QN recap...

...By great mercy last night's quiz passed without incident for a change and there was even a cheer - albeit no more than half-hearted - for the winning team. Just as well perhaps that I was able, therefore, to keep my highly-charged tee-shirt under wraps thus avoiding the inevitable shock and awe its revelation would have produced.

But if the quiz itself were stress free, the night as a whole was not. As a man for whom migraines are virtually synonymous with being awake, I was not at all phased to find my vision had become of a sudden a bit blurry. Ah, we thought, here come the flashing lights to signal yet another bout of pain and dislocation. Who indeed needs psychotropic non-prescription medication when ordinary living provides more hallucinogenic moments than your average San Fran acid party from the 1960s?

Funnily enough though the predicted next steps did not and have not occurred, yet I am left with a blurring of the sight and a half glimpsed block of dark non-vision in the upper left quadrant. And so what does the average hypochondriac do in such circumstances? Why, spend half the night browsing the Net finding diseases to match his symptoms. Gone are the days when one had to flick page after page of dense printed text in the hope of stumbling upon something vaguely relevant to the case. Now a few choice search words and bingo we have 'retinal vein occlusion' as a certain self-diagnosis.

Ab esse ad posse valet of course though, as ever, a posse ad esse non valet. For those whose higher education avoided the intricacies of Thomist theology, that roughly translates as 'ain't necessarily so'. Because RVO exists it does not follow that RVO is what I have, but its a working hypothesis to be tested using appropriate differential diagnostic tools. In short, I could I suppose telephone Moorfields and calming announce I shall be attending shortly with a minimal branch RVO and merely wait for their nodding approval of the self-aware patient.

But hypochondriacs know that proper physicians - and certainly their clinical minions who actually answer the telephones - take a dim view of the all-singing, all-dancing patient who swans through the door with that smug look of "I'm about to tell you so." If I do, therefore, contact the specialists I will simply mumble a few phrases of doubt and concern and leave them to do the donkey work as they prefer. Alternatively I will probably do the 'bloke thing' and simply ignore the whole event in the hope and expectation that it will just go away.

Foolishly enough I tried doing that with cancer a few years back, and funnily enough - you'll agree - as a strategy that one failed abysmally.

And so to ponder the right course of action or inaction.