I imagine this book will thrill and reassure me just the same way Then Again did. It will reveal all the dirty details of disease, I’ll tell myself I should stop but I won’t be able to to because illness, after real estate, is a fetish of mine. Soon after, it will become my life story as I quickly am struck down and (miraculously) recover from the most troubling ailments. Don’t worry about me though, I’ll make it through.  Its David my darling husband who will have suffer through my symptom obsession, he’s who you should be concerned about.

With detailed descriptions of each disease and its history, tips for self-diagnosis, and suggested

treatments, Ian Landau has given you everything you need to know to diagnosis yourself. So, don’t wait for next week’s episode of House, get a copy of The Hypochondriac’s Handbook and diagnosis yourself and your friends today! Discover which of these diseases you should have already died from by now.

About the Author

Ian Landau is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family. He is not a doctor, but his two children don’t know that.

Hypochondriac’s Handbook

Syndromes, Diseases, and Ailments that Probably Should Have Killed You by Now

By Ian Landau

Skyhorse Publishing Hardcover Original

On Sale: July 13, 2010

I’ve never done this before but I need help. I am working on a story about how changes in your life affect your sex life and I am looking for women who have experienced the following: illness, such as MS, and had it affect their sex life for better or worse. I’m also looking for a woman who has experienced job loss, either they have lost a job or their partner and it has caused a shift in their romantic life.

I’m working hard till June 21 so hopefully I’ll be able to blog a bit during then but deadlines always trump posts.

Thank you in advance!

Francesca

Yesterday it rained again and his teacher told him that Mr. James makeup class would have to be postponed for one more day. Dashiell walked up to her and asked, “Mrs. Showell, when we do the makeup class are we putting the makeup on lips or our cheeks?”

She said it was very hard to keep a straight face and try to explain that it wasn’t a makeup class it was a make up class.

Even funnier, later that day the boys were up in my office playing on the computer and when I came up this morning I found the father from my dollhouse wearing the mother’s gold beaded necklace. Now, Conrad is a lego.com hog and I’m sure Mr. Dashiell had to occupy himself while waiting for his brother to let him have a turn and apparently he did.

Maybe your kids are like mine and complain that when you tell them not to kick a soccer ball into your tree peony, they whine “Sometimes it’s like you care more about the flowers than us.” Frankly, sometimes I do. I can even tell you exactly when I cared more about my flowers than my children. It was last Thursday.

It was evening, the boys were playing outside and I had just coerced Conrad to put the soccer ball down and do his homework before we kicked it around so we could have more time to play. Dashiell was wrapped up in an imaginary game of Star Wars and slaying an imaginary Rancor with his real light saber (actually its a pool noodle with duct tape). While helping Conrad use a number grid to count by tens, I could hear Dashiell’s “Hasiwaki Yas” the international ninja/Jedi/badass language for “take this and that” but I didn’t pay attention because I was amazed to find that I actually understood Conrad’s math homework and that much to my surprise, he did too. We finished the math problems and I told him to put the assignment into his backpack, Conrad turned towards the house stopped short and screamed.

I looked over in his direction and I could see the head of one of my prize allium on the driveway. Immediately, I knew what had gone down, but I didn’t want to know, I couldn’t believe it was true. “Conrad, you need to tell me how bad it is before I see for myself.”

“It’s pretty bad mom. Pretty bad,” he said.

Dashiell came strolling around the corner of the house holding his light saber.

“Dashiell, did you slay my beautiful purple flowers with your light saber?” I asked.

“No,” he said smiling,

“You did! You’re lying I can see them,” Conrad hollered.

“Dashiell…. did you…”

“Noooo,” he said stamping his foot and then, as always, he followed with, “I didn’t know,” still trying to smile his usual get out of jail free smile.

I walked towards the bed and saw 20 of my prize flowers—flowers that had grown to be a majestic four feet tall and gave me a sense of accomplishment every time I pulled into the driveway—broken and smashed and strewn all over the walkway. I was in shock; I had been waiting months for them to bloom, actually years. When I was a kid, my father grew allium around a bed that encircled a flagpole we had in our backyard and they were the first real sign of summer, fresh cut grass and freedom.

What was worse, this was not the first time I had told Dashiell to leave them alone. I know they are tempting. They are tall, alien-like purple globes that practically beg you to cut them in a stunning bouquet or to a four-year-old slash them in half with one ninja-like strike. But I had promised myself I wouldn’t even cut them. Last summer I had seen people let them dry in their gardens and they looked antique and otherworldly next to the fresher just bloomed flowers in the beds.

Now I would have to wait an entire year to see my plan come back to life. I was inconsolable.

“Go now, go now to your room,” I yelled not caring that our neighbors, Molly and Sean and her mother who was visiting could hear us next door.

I wanted to weep and I wanted to scream but instead I left because I was too angry. I walked around the block convinced that I never had trespassed into my parent’s world this way. Never. Why is Dashiell so willful? So determined, so damn disrespectful sometimes? It was me, I give in to those dimples and smile too easily. I tell myself he’s still little and needs attention but he knows better. I turned the corner and saw my house again, there was nothing I could do but walk back home, pick up the broken flowers so I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore. I made a low bouquet feeling nauseas and betrayed. There was only one person who would understand. I called my mother.

“Oh Chessie,” was all she said and I knew she knew my heartbreak. She suggested I make him plant something with me tomorrow, “and not something small, something he really has to dig a hole for and work hard at. Choose something you will love as much a delphinium or wait for lupine.” I could hear Dashiell hysterical crying up in his room, but I didn’t mind, it was high time a line was drawn. I got off the phone and Conrad came up to me and said, “I know you liked the flowers in the ground, but they also look pretty in that bouquet.”

“Thanks bunny, I said. I’m just really hurt.” I said and he walked away.

I know its just a few flowers, I know they will grow back but it felt like there was  no space of mine that I had not allowed Dashiell to make his own, this includes, my side of the bed because I wake up at 5:30 to find him tangled around me, my belly fat which he pinches, my butt that he slams soccer balls into, my breasts he still tries to grab, my nose he wants to pinch, my eyes he likes to kiss, my clothes he wants to touch with buttery fingers or a ketchupy face and now my garden. I let David put him to bed as his hysterics continued. I didn’t go up and wasn’t going to go until 8:30 when David came down and said, “The point has been made and now he’s asking for you,” he said.

I went upstairs. Dashiell was lying in his bed still hiccupping tears and said, “I’m sorry I hurt your plants mommy,” as he reached out for a hug. I held him and tried not to cry. “Never do that again.” I said.

“I won’t,” he said.

When the weather gets better I am buying a tall Delphinium because I want to believe him.

Then on Saturday, driving back from long Island, David and I were stuck in a traffic and we saw an exterminator truck on Northern Boulevard in Locust Valley advertising: Bed Bug Specialists.

I have a friend who is so obsessed and fearful of her home in Dobbs Ferry being infested she has laid down some very strict rules that after reading the article now sound like common sense:

She won’t allow anyone who lives in NYC, SF or LA to spend the night at her home. These cities all have bedbug epidemics.

She won’t stay in a hotel in any of these cities.

She won’t ride the subway.

She won’t shop at estate sales, ever. Bedbugs can live in wood. They can burrow into your phone and you have to painstakingly steam clean, chuck or burn everything in order to get rid of them.

“Everything had to go. Margaret recalls a “special company wearing what looked like hazmat suits.” The men removed everything that couldn’t be dry-cleaned—rugs, books, luggage, paintings, shoes, toys, computers, even radios. Only simple, hard-surfaced items, like china and silverware (which even bedbugs can’t burrow into), remained in the apartment.”

Other things you should know but people don’t tell you or talk about:

Bed bugs have an odor (how freaked out are you now!)

Pest Away, a firm mentioned in the peice, receives between 50 and 75 calls about bedbugs from the Upper East Side every week—and that’s just one firm.

Bedbugs tend to bite in threes—either in a line or in a triangle. In the article is says, “In exterminator jargon, this pattern is known as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” They have been known to leave triangular shaped bites on victim’s foreheads.

And now for some service: The number one way to turn a problem into an infestation:

If you have them in your mattress get rid of your mattress. Don’t move to the couch. If you move to the couch, they will move to your couch and infest your whole apartment. According to my friend, “they just want to stay with the food source.”

And you know what? She is a hot mess—an expression I can’t get enough of. She is this petite, porcelain little thing with dazzling blue eyes and a sly smile that says,  maybe I did and maybe I did!

I would never be described as a hot mess. Now that I think about it,  I’m pretty sure I was a ‘lukewarm sloppy’ at a party I went to Saturday night and then I probably became a ‘drunk mess,’ but I was not a hot mess. I talk way to much to be a hot mess.

But apparently after looking at The Cut’s round up of red carpet looks from The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala last night there are all sorts of ways you can miss the hot mess target. What’s most surprising to me is that all these women have great taste at their disposal and they still can’t hit it, but I guess that’s what makes it all the more delicious.

The eyeshadow just makes her look crazy

The zipper on this jumpsuit has hot mess potential but she is wearing it with as much sex appeal as she would wear a velor sweatsuit.

I'm sure she is a hot mess but there's something about the lighting in this picture that makes her look like more like a scary mess.

My dad was discharged from the hospital on Friday and my parents insisted they could manage by themselves, in fact my dad sounded so chipper on the phone that morning I couldn’t argue.

I had the whole day to myself because dad conveniently had has his heart attack during spring break. David took the kids to visit his family in Rockport and I spent time with my parents at the hospital. Now they didn’t need me and David and the boys would not be home until Saturday afternoon. I had nearly two days all to myself.

I should have been excited, but to be honest I was a little panicked. I hadn’t been alone for a weekend since…I didn’t know. It must have been before Dashiell was born and traveled to LA for a story but even then I was with friends from work, or maybe it was when I went on that press trip to St. Barths, but then I was with a pack of other reporters. Either way it was at least five years since I had been alone—completely alone for nearly two days.

So I did what any out of sorts mother would do: I purged and rearranged the kid’s playroom. I shunted the Playmobil toys to their bedroom toy chest. They don’t play with them but as soon as I donate them to charity, they’ll ask where they are. I cleaned under the couch and rescued the missing GoGos Conrad has become obsessed with and was heartbroken to lose (imagine if Pokemon and those little plastic ninjas you can get a pizza parlor vending machine had a baby they would make a GoGo.) and I created active play spaces for Dashiell to color and do crafts and play Batman. Lately Conrad’s Legos have monopolized the playroom and if real estate is power Conrad has become a pint-sized Ratner slowly expanding his domain and putting restrictions on where Dashiell can play. He had to be contained.

After the purge, I went shopping at the best New Jersey has to offer: Home Goods and the Christmas Tree Shops (stop laughing!). I got these bamboo blinds for next to nothing at the Christmas Tree Shops to make the playroom and upstairs bath and my office just a tad bit more pulled together and zippy. Seriously, stop laughing they were $15 each!

Then I moved on to more ambitious projects and I am now considering hanging this wallpaper in my downstairs powder room.

I love it and Erin, a good friend has totally endorsed it which makes me feel good about getting in touch with my inner or maybe I should say my future Palm Beach self. I still have to sell David on it. He usually goes along with most of my ideas, but this paper is fairly splashy. I roadtested it on the boys when they came home and Conrad turned to me and said, “Can you please stop changing the house?” Granted this was after I had rearranged the playroom and he was so unsure about the furniture choices I made that he re-rearranged the room back at 6:15 Sunday morning. A feat that included dragging the dog crate from one side of the couch to the other—with the dog still in it. He did ask if he could do it before he went ahead. It was 6:15 and I thought he wanted to move the end tables I had repositioned into a coffee table back against the wall so he could spread out on the floor and watch TV. Frankly I would have agreed to anything at 6:15.

When I came down at 7:30 I was shocked that he had moved so much furniture around on his own, especially when he rarely offers to help me with even the smallest household tasks like pairing socks. But the zinger was that the room looked good and much better for kids to play in. I had to go along with his plan. I guess I have to wait until high school for a coffee table.

There are so many things that Conrad and I can disagree about: whether or not to hit is brother; whether or not I always take his brothers side; if his brother has a more orange juice, a better school, or cooler zhuzhu pet…but I never expected I would have to argue with Conrad about decor and design. The problem is he has extremely strong opinions and like the other morning genuinely good ideas. I’m torn between this inner argument that says  “Its my house and the whole place is Lego and Mythbusters and Godzilla so I get to pick the way the furniture is arranged” and wanting to hear him out because based on the fairly intricate Lego ships he builds I know he knows how we could fit our canopy bed in the attic to make a master suite even though it has gabled roof.

But back to the wallpaper; I showed Dashiell the swatch of wallpaper and he said, “It was bright and he loved it and wanted to live in there.” I showed Conrad the swatch and he pleaded, “Can you just tone down all the colors because sometimes when I’m in the bathroom I already feel sick and that color might make me feel more sick.”

Maybe I can compromise? He figures out the attic and I get the powder room. One of my favorite design books is called a Pattern Language. One of the best ideas in it is the concept of the teenage cottage, where you transform a garage or shed into a place for your teenager to hang out, but there is no plumbing or kitchen so that the kids have to come home eventually. Maybe we should be focusing on that and not the powder room at all.

Even though spring break is on the calendar for months ahead of time when the actual week comes it always feels like it sneaks up on us and we are surfing the web to find activities and friends who will be around while we are around to make the week off feel special. Our plan was going well…

Monday David and I took the boys to the Intrepid. We parked the car in Weehawken and rode the ferry over. It was fun even though the guard at the submarine told Dashiell he couldn’t go down below because he was too short, which resulted in a lot, and I mean a lot of tears and was very mean to do a little boy. David reported him to a manager and the Intrepid staff did was tell us that particular guard was a temp. Hopefully the incident will tarnish Dashiell’s infatuation with the military.

That evening David and I went to see the Flaming Lips at the Welmont. I was feeling very much 40-years-old before the concert, wondering how long the warm up band would play and how late we’d get home. I didn’t want to have a drink because I was afraid I’d fall asleep. David suggested we ride our bikes to the show and it turned the whole night around. We parked our bikes in front of the theater feeling very Earth Day friendly, saved on parking and looked rosy cheeked and awake. We overheard a guy scalping tickets say to the owner of a bodega on Bloomfield Ave, “Sold out show tonight, but its a real nerdy weird crowd.” We couldn’t disagree; I was wearing a bike helmet and a girl walked by us wearing a pink tutu. The show was an amazing strobe light, beach ball and streamers spectacle with negative-like images of a naked woman dancing on a video screen with a tattoo or jeweled necklace with the word “BROKEN” scrawled across her chest. There’s something about standing next to your husband of twelve years singing Vaseline that can rehab a marriage that feels distracted and just plain pooped out. But what really got me was when Wayne said, “You know I see a lot of people thinking about how their lives should be and they think and think but all your life is who you kiss and touch and what you taste and what you do.” By the finale of Do You Realize, I was crying. I felt like maybe I’m the only one crying because I’m old, until I saw a younger woman in front of me wiping away tears too. We rode our bikes home and did a few extra loops around the block because we had an extra 15 minutes. It was a breezy night and flower petals were swirling in the street.

Tuesday: My mom called just as we were about to take boys to Applegates for ice cream after dinner. My dad had heart attack and was in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital. I arrived in the city in less than hour. My mom was smoking outside of the hospital. He was going to have an angiogram tomorrow that would tell us if he was need open-heart surgery again; he had a double bypass 18 years ago. I drove her home to Pleasant Valley. Here’s what I learned: my mother carries at least 7 lighters in her purse at all times. I’ve always known my parents live far out in the boonies of Dutchess County, New York, but when you have to drive about 80 miles to get home from NYC after being in the ER you feel those miles. There is a very discreet and chic hotel called The Surrey that gives discounts if you have a family members staying at Lenox Hill. My mom checked in the next day.

Wednesday: My dad was in the throws of a second heart attack when they were operating on him. His doctor, an attractive Indian man named Dr. Pireack, who is called a cardio interventionist, saved his life on the operating table. He opened one artery that was shutting down by putting in three stents and had pictures to prove it. After the procedure he came into the waiting room and showed us an image of my dad’s heart where his veins looked like tangled shrubbery, small, light and leading to nowhere. Then he showed an image of my dad’s heart after he performed the angioplasty: the shrubbery was cleared to create one large thick dark branch that ran than length of his heart. It was obvious that he was impressed with his handiwork and I was too—he did this laproscopically in less than an hour. I wanted to hug him but I realized he was like a superhero and the one thing I learned from watching Batman with Dashiell is that no one ever hugs a superhero. When we saw Dad in the recovery room, his Casper-like complexion was replaced with the healthy blush of a man returning from a rendezvous with his mistress in St. Barths. He looked downright virile. But it was not an easy day. At 6pm my dad confessed to his cardiologist, Dr. Seinfeld, that he was having pain and had been having it immediately after the surgery but didn’t say anything because he didn’t want to be a party pooper when everyone was so pleased with the success of the procedure. He also tried to get up and popped open the valve that was holding his vein shut. Given that he was on mega doses of blood thinners, blood poured out of his leg onto the floor and three nurses had to clean him up and change the sheets. They kept telling him not to look down but he said that he hadn’t had that much action in below his waist in over a decade and he was not going to miss it, which made him the talk of the floor.

After that incident, there was concern he was rejecting the stents, had a clot and would need to go back in for more stents or open-heart surgery. They paged Dr. Pireack who finally came back just as I was leaving at 9:30, I ran up to him and walked at his brisk pace explaining that my dad was very uncomfortable and rarely complains so if he is having pain he must really be hurting. He sat down listened and then told my dad to eat something and that the pain would subside in the morning.

Thursday: Dad was sleeping.  My mom didn’t think I needed to come so she told me the playroom toys looked disgusting. I didn’t know if she was kidding or not so I cleaned and rearranged it but when I was done I drove into the city. When I arrived at the hospital he was sitting up, reading the paper and explaining what derivatives mean to my mom. I was so relieved, it was as if he was sitting at the kitchen table and relaxed and yesterday never happened only he looked like he had a tan. We talked about my work and brainstormed for ways to me get paid faster now that freelance feels like the new unemployment. My dad has always been someone I could talk to, who would hear me and has a friendly way of suggesting ideas without really telling me what to do. He has fathered me in a way that combines practical advice with confidence in me, and lately I haven’t been feeling so confident and because he talks to me about his work like a friend I always feel reassured.

My dad needed to walk to floor, so he walked me to the elevators. He hugged me and thanked me for coming. I stepped into the elevator and he stood there, slightly hunched in hospital gown, his gray hair splayed flat against the back of his head and smiled and waved. My dad’s health problems, his weakness and arthritis have overshadowed his personality lately, he’s more cranky, tired, exasperated by noise from the kids and not up for a lot of talking during dinner, something he used to love. He has still be there in our lives, but less so and less happy and it’s hard to watch and feel the distance and not really be sure how to connect with him. Sometimes I wonder if it’s been his way of preparing us for his death. Something my mother has been trying to manage without being angry with him.

But today it was as if I was 20 again and he was 60, only I now I’m not taking him for granted. It was a little eerily fitting that this week started with the Flaming Lips show. During the show Wayne talked about a kid who is 16 in his show, one of those people who dances on the side and that his dad died on Chritmas Eve and then he broke into “Do You Realize”.  I will always remember his smile as the elevator door closed. It was today that mattered. I was with my dad again after a very long time of trying to reach him but not being able because I was too busy with the kids and my own life and I was preparing for a separation the more tired and weaker he seemed. Thanks to Dr. Pireack, now his smile, his voice, his whole sense of himself feel lifted, like he got a tune-up on life and that distance is gone. I should have hugged him.