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By LeRae Haynes 

I’m the first one to say that your health is your own business. Whether you’re a hypochondriac running to the doctor for a displaced nose hair, or a terminal self-diagnostic who will only go to a doctor if a recognizable internal organ has fallen out on the sidewalk, I figure that, for the most part, what you do about your health is up to you. 

I fall into the self-diagnostic category, myself. I grew up in a religious culture that ranked health right up there with the piousness of the Old Testament prophets. There was almost a cheerful snobbery inherent in the belief that if you adhered to stringent, healthy-living practices, you would be healthy. And there was even scientific research to prove it. As a child, I grew up hearing in church that, once again, medical statistics showed that the chosen ones were the healthy ones. 

People went to doctors if they were already pretty sure what was wrong: a broken bone, Mumps or the onset of labour. You never went to a doctor without a short-list of diagnostic outcomes, as well as a list of acceptable treatment options. 

No wonder my husband calls my doctors appointments ‘consultations with your colleagues.’ 

It’s not that I grew up without exposure to the standard medical profession---I was a terrible klutz who constantly crashed into things, fell off things and stumbled over things. I had stitches 10 times before I was 10 years old. I had mumps, like everyone else in the early 1960s, and once my grandmother took me to a doctor because I got poison oak from the inside out, including my esophagus and the inside of my cranium.  

That was kind of funny, really. She was the queen of home remedies--a staunch believer that if you got sick, even despite your militant approach to healthy living, there was a home treatment that would fix you up just fine. If you complained about an ailment, like a stomach ache, a head cold or a hematoma the size of a walrus, she had just the thing. 

With zealous cheer, she applied hot mustard plasters, dunked you in cold water and wrapped you like a mummy in a sheet until you either felt better or dissolved in a claustrophobic melt-down, and fed you teaspoons of black, gritty charcoal powder that most people used to clean their fish tanks. 

She believed that iodine would cure any external cut or abrasion, and could even speed the healing of a compound fracture. I once disguised a scalp wound for a week with colourful hair ribbons to avoid having iodine, or ‘ionic acid’, as I called it, poured in the open wound. 

Once I was an adult the main reason I went to the doctor or to the hospital was to have a baby. 

And then everything changed. I was getting ready to move to Williams Lake from Bella Coola, and while on a weekend visit here, caught whooping cough from a friend of my husband’s. 

When I showed up at the hospital in Bella Coola with a cough that threatened to dislodge my internal organs, they had to dig my medical records out of obscurity. When I was diagnosed, the doctor told me that there is no cure for whooping cough and I was put on antibiotics that did nothing for the symptoms—they just made me non-contagious to people around me. 

People take whooping cough very seriously. Health nurses from both Bella Coola and Williams Lake sat me down and solemnly had me fill out a form with the names of everyone who had been within four feet of me in three months. All of my immediate family and one close friend all were tested for it, and had to go on the antibiotics, even though none of them got sick. 

It took me more than three months to get well---a real blow to the ‘healthy living equals perfect health’ philosophy of my upbringing. I fractured a rib coughing, couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs and sustained lung damage that will affect me for the rest of my life. 

And here’s the thing. The woman I caught it from told me that she had this horrible, wracking cough that lasted for weeks, but didn’t bother going to the doctor. 

I think you can use all the mustard plasters and Echinacea you want, but you shouldn’t make other people pay for your personal medical proclivities. It took the Bird Flu and the Swine Flu scares in Canada to make carelessly spreading germs almost as big a social issue as drinking and driving. Who would ever have thought that you would practically be added to a ‘Registered Illness Infector’ list if you neglected to sneeze into your elbow, for example, or went to work while experiencing flu symptoms? 

I’m sitting home this week on antibiotics with bronchial pneumonia. I get this about once a year, and my doctor says that weakened lungs from having whooping cough as an adult is definitely a contributing factor. 

Being sick is, really, not all about you, and your health is not just your business. Live as healthy as you want, but wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick and go see your doctor to find out what’s up. You may be equipped to fight something off, but the person you infect may not.