‘How are you?’ or ‘How do you do?’ is how people greet each other. The staple reply you expect is ‘Good’ or ‘Fine’ or sometimes a deviant ‘Not so bad’.
Once in a while you meet a special class of people for whom this question is not just a manner of greeting but who understand it as our genuine urge to discern the status of their health – past, present and future. For them an innocent ‘How are you’ is no longer a simple mode of greeting but a question which ought to bring forth intricately detailed account of their life and beyond.
I have met a few from that class of people - who are ardent hypochondriacs. You can take any topic under the sun and they would steer it towards their health records with unerring accuracy. Even a mundane topic to start a conversation say, weather, elicits an unrelated response as to how it affects their health.
They have some common traits.
They normally set the stage for the onslaught by saying that they are not concerned with their health and that they do not bestow the attention that it deserves. Starting with a paradox would catch naïve people totally off guard.
A quick conversation starter like ‘How’s life’ is what they would normally wait for. They would pounce on it like a stalking feline. You should consider yourself lucky if they begin with their great grand parents’ congenital disorders and continue with the frequent hurting of their clavicle. Until they’ve told you this you wouldn’t have known that such a part ever existed in your body. If you have the panache to shut yourself from them and still give verbal or visual responses – they can go on and on and on until your ears drop.
The next phase would be to explain how healthy they were during their prime. They elucidate how they used to down humungous amounts of food. Next, they would explain their heightened state of physical fitness during their prime and how they could cover several hundred kilometers every day by foot. Of course, they had to be captains of their college team sport that they practiced.
And the other paradox is that they actually are healthier than normally healthy people except that they worry themselves to death over their health and make you sick in the process.
They can describe with great clarity the mode of chemical changes that a drug can bring about in your physiological constitution. They have no difficulty in enlightening you how the wind speed actually lowered the growth rate of their noses.
My experience is that they corner you so dexterously that there is no escape route and you cannot walk away from them. They would deftly deter all attempts to change the topic.
I have found a solution for such people. I start nagging about my health and see how quickly they change the topic. It’s worked for me!
