Age 12: Self-induced brain trauma. When I was a kid, for some reason I preferred shaking my head like a dog to dry my hair, rather than using a towel like a normal person. It occurred to me that it might not be entirely safe to violently shake my head once a day, so I called a nurse hotline and asked the nurse whether I could damage my brain by shaking my hair dry. There was a long pause, and then finally she said that I would probably be okay, but she wouldn’t recommend it. I started using a towel.

Age 17: A cyst. When I was in high school, I discovered that a small bump was starting to form right underneath my ear. I found this profoundly concerning, and went to see a doctor who told me that it was a harmless cyst that would eventually go away on its own. It did.

Age 21: Pneumonia. I capped a semester of studying abroad in Australia with a weeklong hike in the tropical rainforest, then came back to a blizzard in Minnesota, got our family van stuck in a snowbank and spent three hours digging it out, and came down with pneumonia. I was so sick I could hardly get out of bed, and I thought the end was near…but then I got better.

Ages 25-35: STDs. The existence of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases played right into my Catholic-school-instilled belief that if you ever did anything at all sexually pleasurable before you were married, God would find a way to punish you for your transgression. The clinic at my grad school provided free or cheap screenings for everything, and any time I did anything that carried any remote risk of STD transmission, I’d go in and get checked. The nurse got to know me, and eventually when I’d come in she’d give me a look that said, “Got to third base at a party again, huh?”

Age 29: Peeing my pants. I’d sit at my desk for long hours in grad school, and one year I started to notice that I was peeing my pants a little bit while I sat there. Not a lot, but still—not ideal, and possibly, I thought, a symptom of a tumor or some other fatal condition involving my colon. I went in to the Man Doctor, who listened to my story and said in an understandably grumpy tone, “Well, you’ve just bought yourself a rectal exam!” So that happened, and then he said I was perfectly healthy and would stop peeing my pants if I’d just stop routinely drinking diuretics like coffee and Diet Coke by the liter. (He also suggested that I masturbate daily, because he had some theory about pressure building up down there.) I cut back on the coffee and soda, and sure enough, I stopped pissing myself.

Age 31: Cataplexy. Everyone sometimes gets weak from laughter, but I’ve always had this thing where when I laugh hard—especially when I’m tired and/or hungry—my upper body sort of slumps. In extreme cases, laughter can make me fall to the floor. After a couple of dramatic falling-down incidents—including one where a guy almost got caught in an elevator door when he was running to ask me a question, and one where I discovered that an awkwardly-shaped green tchotchke at a furniture store was labeled “olive wood probe”—my friends convinced me to go to the doctor. I was referred to a neurologist who told me I have geloplegia, a specialized form of cataplexy in which sudden laughter can cause loss of muscle control. It’s never going to get either better or worse, he said, so I’ll be fine as long as I don’t succumb to a fit of laughter in a body of water (apparently there have been hot-tub drowning deaths linked to geloplegia) or on train tracks.

Age 36: A heart attack. One night after going on a pedal pub and then biking several miles home, I woke up with my heart pounding and a painful tightness across my chest. Google said YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE, but common sense said that probably wasn’t the case—so I didn’t go to the emergency room, and instead went in to get a physical and EKG the next day. Everything came back fine, and in retrospect I think the pounding heart was because of the booze and the chest tightness was because of all the leaning forward on my handle bars. But the whole incident gave me a lot of anxiety, which led to…

Age 36: Numbness. I was sure the tips of my fingers and toes were starting to feel numb, and I’d wake up at night with my arm asleep in what seemed somehow a more ominous manner than arms usually fall asleep when you lay on them. I went back to the doctor, to be told that I was still fine. My mom then mentioned that we have a family history of anxiety, and said that she’s had numbness scares herself. Good to know.

Age 36: Fuzzy vision. The final incident in what I now think of as the Anxiety Trilogy came a few weeks after the numbness, when I became sure that my vision was starting to get blurry. That could either be, I thought, (a) me finally needing glasses, like a lot of people do; (b) me developing a tumor or some other fatal disease behind my eyes; or (c) the anxiety again. I decided to try ignoring it and telling myself to stop being so fucking crazy all the time. That worked.

Age 37: Athlete’s foot. After catching athlete’s foot from an insufficiently sanitized bowling shoe, my skin started to crack in the dry winter air. I had a moment of panic, imagining one infection leading to a worse infection leading to DEATH, and looked up the urgent-care clinic hours. Then, the next morning, my foot felt fine. Eventually the infection started to get better, and I realized that I would probably live through this particular bout of athlete’s foot.

– Jay Gabler