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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Speaking of relating_to_books:
"...there was no marvel that, just as I rose to youth, a sorceress, finding me lost in vague mental wanderings, with many affections and few objects, glowing aspirations and gloomy prospects, strong desires and slender hopes, should lift up her illusive lamp in the distance, and lure me to her vaulted home of horrors."
The_Professor, Charlotte Brontė, p. 180
Yup. Cutting aside the fanciful language, and the part about being a lonely only child (although I felt rather isolated at school at this point), I also had hypochondria harass me around puberty. And I'd thought in grade five, when I'd learned about the gory details of this soon-to-come bodily transformation, that the nervousness would come from the prospect of potential if not actual sex.
Not that it would bring with it acute fear of death, young death: fears that asthma would choke me, gut pains signaled appendicitis, and a lingering cough was lung cancer, pneumonia, or tuberculosis. I wasn't aware TB wasn't a current concern. My sources were Lurlene McDaniel novels where 1 out of 3 characters have cancer, older novels, Reader's Digest articles. Sometimes I hid under my pillow a 1950s medical dictionary, relic from the cottage.
That book also spoke of sex, or rather the results thereof: I learned of things that could go wrong with having babies, like ectopic pregnancy; I pored over the pseudopregnancy article, fascinated (how can minds affect bodies like that? as if they were not part and parcel of the same system).
Oh yes, and the illness when I was 13 wasn't just in my head. Coughs, recurring headaches in evenings (such as Monday evenings, choir), drove me to seek out a doctor's appointment, which referred me to the hospital for testing. I remember feeling scared and vulnerable in a thin blue gown, stepping onto the X-ray machine.
Concern 1: My breasts aren't adequately covered. I am acutely aware I have nipples, which is embarrassing.
Concern 2: They're going to find a lung tumour and I'll have two more months to live. Okay, maybe three.
A week or so later, the doctor called. Mom or Dad picked up the phone. I remember being in the living room, inclining my ear, anxious. The verdict: sinus infection.
Is that dangerous? (It did sound less dreadful than what I'd feared.)
Not too much, but since it's not going away on its own, she's going to prescribe you antibiotics, okay?
Medicine. Cure.
My little brother's mocking voice: "What do you mean, she has a SCIENCE infection?"
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