Free The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. by Gene Weingarten

post-menopausal Caucasian women.
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    Doctors will sometimes ask a patient to eat two saltines without water; Sjogren’s victims cannot do it.
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    Sjogren’s syndrome can lead to tooth rot, sexual dysfunction, and greater susceptibility to lymphatic cancers. There are support groups for victims of Sjogren’s syndrome. They are mostly women in middle age. They are very careful with their lipstick.
    The Blahs. You don’t feel good. You can’t quite put your finger on it. You are weak and achy and maybe you have a slight sore throat or fever. Medically this is “malaise,” and it usually means a cold is coming on. Some serious ailments begin this way, too, the most terrifying of which may be Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or erythema multiforme. You start by just feeling crappy. Soon there are eruptions on the lips, the tongue, and the inside of the mouth. You blister horribly. It spreads to the genitals and, sometimes, the anus. Sometimes you go blind. Here is how bad it is: Sometimes the only place that can treat you is a hospital burn unit.
    Words on the Tip of Your Tongue. It is called “partial anomia” or “tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.” You find yourself having increasing trouble retrieving the right, er, er, er … word. It could just mean benign forgetfulness: As you get older, memory and retrieval functions sometimes get a little impaired. But neurologists know partial anomia can be an early sign of several degenerative dementias. It occurs with the onset of tumors in the left hemisphere of the brain, or in metabolic disturbances typical of terminal liver disease. It can also be the very, very tip of the very, very cold iceberg known as er, er, er … Alzheimer’s.
    Nausea. Having nausea in the absence of vomiting is like drinking NutraSweet in the absence of Diet Coke. What’s thepoint? Fortunately, simple lack of appetite coupled with a vague nausea that doesn’t make you puke is seldom a serious symptom. Unfortunately, when it is a serious symptom, what it is a symptom of is an oncoming heart attack.
    Snorting Out Food. You are dining on, say, spaghetti carbonara. Someone tells a joke, but not just any joke. It must be a joke with a certain kind of punch line: a bad-boy punch line, unexpected and a little wicked, like the one about why women don’t skydive naked. 6 Suddenly you’ve got pasta and bacon dribbling out of your nose. Now, maybe you are just a slob, but possibly you have a degenerative disease in the muscles served by the cranial nerves. In the early stages, these conditions can cause the sudden, startling nasal regurgitation of food or drink. The later stages make the sudden, startling nasal regurgitation of food or drink seem like the height of prandial etiquette.
    Bad Breath. Medical texts first warn you, in medical-text language, that the most likely cause of bad breath is crummy dental hygiene. The catchall medical term for organisms that cause your breath to stink is “oral flora.” As in, “Yo, Vinnie, stand downwind on account of your oral flora is making me want to puke up this here sausage.” Once bad breath has been eliminated as a cause of bad breath, the physiology gets much more interesting, and specific. A musty, fishy odor on alternatively, a sickeningly sweet odor could be an early sign of terminal liver failure. A light, fruity odor could mean ketoacidosis, a condition that frequently accompanies diabetes. An odor of ammonia could mean nephritic gingivitis, a mouth-and-gum disease linked to incipient kidney failure. A stench of rotting garbage could mean lung disease. A smell of sweaty feet or cheese can indicate a serious metabolic disorder. A smell of garlic may be a sign of poisoning by arsenic, selenium, tellurium, or phosphorus. However, all of these things are likely to be accompanied by other signs, such as fatigue,mouth sores, a bloody cough, jaundiced skin, or extreme thirst.
    There is only one