I have been a hypochondriac for my entire life. My first phantom illness was at the age of two, when I developed a mysterious limp which lasted for several months. My parents hauled me around the country to all sorts of different specialists after my mother had watched me like a hawk for some time and realised that I was hobbling consistently and not only when I thought somebody was looking. Family wisdom has it that I was inspired to do this in order to compete for concern and attention with my brother, a year younger than me and sickly from the beginning with chronic diarrhea. The specialists found nothing wrong and the limp eventually passed, leaving me with a slightly shrunken leg and my parents none the wiser. I proceeded onto the usual childhood illnesses, the most memorable being a series of bouts of raging tonsillitis, which brought more concrete rewards in the form of special invalid foods: roast chicken and exotic juices and nectars sold in exclusive one-litre cartons instead of cans or plastic bottles.

The next serious imaginary illness developed in my teens. At the age of thirteen, I stopped eating. Anorexia was suspected, but in fact it was a conscious ploy to keep me out of school where I was the current pariah amongst my group of female friends. It's a feat which mystifies me even today: I put myself on strict rations of a cup of milk a day, and stayed home in my nightie getting thinner and thinner. I don't know what eventually convinced me to give it up and go back to school; it might have been the get well card which came from my class, signed by my tormentors in a way that made me believe that all was forgiven. It turned out to be a ruse, because on my first day back at school they followed me into the toilets where they loudly declared that they knew I hadn't really been sick, while I cowered in a cubicle and considered my options.

After the uncertain success of this illness, the hypochondria went into abeyance for a while. In my early twenties I developed a few real ailments which seem to have kept me busy over this period: cerebral malaria, cervical dysplasia, a Cambodian parasite which had me projectile vomiting for three weeks, a broken collarbone, anaemia.

In the last year or so, the phantom diseases have returned. They always have their basis in a real physical symptom which is then magnified into something terminal, helped along by google-diagnosis and a consciousness that I'm now reaching an age where things really might go wrong.
They serve a different psychological purpose than their predecessors, which I didn't really believe in but used as means to an end. Now they form part of an elaborate game of worst scenarios which I have started playing, in order to second guess my own physical vulnerability. If I treat every swollen lymph node as lymphoma, I will always be prepared for the worst. This is a hypochondria for the mature years, and probably the thing which convinces me more than anything else that I am ageing.