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I totally agree with Carol Hedges’ take on hypochondria—although I can’t escape several millennia of Jewish motherly conviction that chicken soup will cure or at least prevent everything from a hangnail to coronavirus.
Hmmm… Excuse me. I’m just going to defrost another chicken. Meanwhile, see Carol’s hilarious blog post below.
Saturday, 29 February 2020
You Don’t Have To Be Jewish …
Hello. My name is Carol and I’m a hypochondriac. I am also Jewish. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a hypochondriac, but if you want to do it properly, being Jewish gives you a definite edge.
No, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s thousands of years of knowing we are the Chosen People while being constantly told to go and be chosen somewhere else. Listen, what do I know? Am I an analyst?
I do know that I spend a lot of time on the internet googling symptoms that I might have. And I mean A Lot of time. As a result, I have narrowly escaped a whole raft of illnesses, including some that are apparently only present in cattle. [click here for more of this post]
Barb Taub 
Ah, chicken soup …aka Jewish penicillin. A small Jewish joke. A famous actor dies on stage. The stage manager comes out and tells the audience what has happened. From the darkened auditorium comes a voice, ‘Give him some chicken soup!’. ‘Madam, replies the SM, ‘this man is dead. It can do him no good. ‘ ‘So?’ the woman replies, ‘ it can’t do him any harm, nuh?’ (We Jews also have cornered the market in black humour…)
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Haha! So maybe chicken soup isn’t ALWAYS the answer…
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My take on your Blog about “you don’t have to be Jewish” is that it really refers only to females. The male version is “if you ignore it it will go away eventually.” Sometimes works with children.
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But there is the male corollary: the man-flu. He knows that he’s so tough that if he DOES get sick, it can only be the result of lethal levels of infection, and probably all that’s left is to tell his family he loved them.
This is generally not well-received by his wife, who still drove carpool, did the laundry, and only missed one day of work when she had the flu the week before.
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Rofl 🤣 Thank you for sharing! It reminded me of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In a Boat:
“I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.”
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And that’s NOTHING compared to the ways Dr. Google will predict your imminent demise!
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It’s hard to resist the temptation to google your symptoms but, after my last diagnostic and unnecessary surgery (ugh!) I ask myself – “you really want to have a tube up your “ahem” for a week?” – and then I google “stars aging badly” instead. There’s a restaurant in Queens that makes a miracle chicken soup and it’s not Jewish style – it’s Mexican!
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Tortilla chicken soup! A completely acceptable substitute.
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Funny!
I have ALWAYS ignored these scares because they seem to mainly hit the ‘elderly’. This year I am turning 60. ACK! The virus is coming for me.
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We have seen the future and it’s our (gray-haired, AARP-carded) selves!
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This is hilarious and true in many ways.
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So funny!!
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