ALL her relatives call her ‘Ms Misery’ because she is always so helpless and miserable. She is my mother’s cousin, so I call her ‘Aunt Misery’ in her absence.
In our opinion, her problem is that she has no real problem. She either imagines problems or creates them for herself. For instance, her greatest misery is that nobody feels for her miseries. Even her doctor does not take her ‘serious’ ailments seriously, and instead of giving her medication, he prescribes that she should exercise and diet.
Exercise is not her forte either. She is just not made for hard work. She wants her doctor to realize that and prescribe real medication for her chain of ailments — indigestion, insomnia and black moods. Her black moods make her eat more, hence the indigestion and insomnia. The chain ultimately becomes a vicious circle and her doctor prescribes diet, exercise, diet and exercise again.
I think it’s not very healthy for me to say that there are people who enjoy their ill health. But my Aunt does that. I find it kind of funny. When my aunt comes to my house, she complains about the weather. It’s either very hot or very cold out there — which is very bad for her blood pressure, or lungs, or nerves, or kidneys. In sympathy, I offer her something to drink but everything I offer is wrong because it does something terrible to some part of her body.
“Would you like to have orange or lemon juice?”
“No, thanks, it’s bad for my arthritis.”
“Apple or grape juice?”
“They are hazardous to my sensitive skin.”
“What about tea or coffee?”
“Not good for my high blood pressure and high cholesterol level. Besides, they generate insomnia.”
I feel so ashamed; I don’t have anything in my house that can quench my guest’s thirst. In the end, I offer water. She refuses it curtly only because it’s considered rude and inhospitable to offer water to a guest in my culture.
She will remain very health conscious for some time, because she has come to visit me after taking a test from a hospital. In the course of a long evening, she will gulp three large pieces of cake and patties filled with minced meat or mashed potatoes with our customary evening tea.
When I’ll see that she has no intention to leave, I’ll invite her to have dinner with us, hoping it will remind her that she has to leave after all. But, she very graciously will agree to eat dinner with us. She’ll not object to any dish cooked in oil with lot of spices. She’ll eat dinner and dessert with appetite and relish. Then she’ll help herself to two mugs of coffee, with milk and sugar, just to give dinner a nice finale, while I’ll keep myself close to the telephone just in case I have to call 911.
I think people like my Aunt Misery are just happy to have these ailments. They also have a group of friends with similar disorders with whom they not only exchange views, but also exchange the alternate treatments they have tried already. This proves the proverb that misery loves company.
In the good old days when you went to a doctor, he used to give medication. Now what he gives is a test, or a series of tests. This is called specialization. The doctor sends the patient to another doctor or a lab to take a test. My aunt loves tests, not for test’s sake but she likes to hear the news of negative results. She adores everything negative. She had kept the negatives of all her pictures from her marriage to date, though she knows very well that she wouldn’t need them today, because the technology has so advanced that they can print pictures from her pictures. She also knows that she would never be able to discern her negatives from her granddaughters’ because of her failing eyes and the fading negatives. Still, she keeps them because they give her some sort of security, I’m not sure of what kind.
After hearing the good news of negative results, she might come to visit me — or you. It depends whose house is closer to her doctor.
“It’s very hot out there,” she would say.
“Would you like to have orange or lemon juice?”
This circle goes on and on, and that is not all. She has more problems. Her husband is a great golf player but she cannot walk with him. He is a great swimmer and diver, but she is afraid to go into water. She is heavy but she thinks that her husband’s height and athletic body makes her look shorter and more obese than she really is. This fact or fiction makes her miserable too.
One of her greatest miseries is that her friends are as insensitive as her relatives. They keep burdening her with their senseless problems, bad experiences and even their personal family tragedies without thinking how susceptible she is. They just don’t care for her feelings.
The other day, her BMW did not start with the remote control. It was hard for her to go to the car, open it and start it. She was miserable until she realized that she was not pressing the right button. There was nothing wrong with the car or the remote, but still she was upset because nobody had pointed out to her that she had not been pressing the right button. People have become so selfish that they just don’t want to help somebody in distress. She was miserable the whole day, thinking about how she had kept worrying all that time for nothing.
I often go to her to distract myself from my own problems. Being with her, I realize that there have always been problems and there always will be problems. My problems are nothing compared to Ms Misery’s because my troubles are going to get solved one day, but her miseries are so miserably great, and so varied, that they keep multiplying everyday.
I don’t think all of Ms Misery’s problems can be solved in one lifetime.
