Mar 22, 2024 4 min read

The winter I was a graduate student at Northwestern University in 1982, my right eyelid twitched. It twitched during classes and it twitched in the evenings when I studied. On weekends, when I would occasionally go out to local Evanston pubs with my fellow students, my eye would twitch so consistently that I thought people were on to me.

“Do you notice something about my eye?” I would ask my roommate. She would lean in, stare into my right eye for a while, lean back and take a sip of her beer and nod. When I looked closely in the mirror, I could see my eyelashes jerking side to side.

This was when I was 23, and in my anxious years when every little twinge (or twitch) sent me into a spiral of worry that would last a day or two, or at least until that twinge or pain faded and was replaced by a new one. This was long before the internet tempted us to Google our symptoms, and before I could walk into an urgent care to have them take a look. I remember thinking about going to the university clinic, but to say what? My eye is jinky?

My daughter recently had a new and minor pain. By the time she called me to ask what I thought about it, she’d already spent time Googling, and reached several scary but wildly unlikely self diagnoses. She has never tended toward anxiety or hypochondria, so when I explained that both of her conclusions were unlikely if not impossible, she stopped worrying and the pain went away.

Now that I’m at this age, I have an Advent calendar of pains. Every morning I do my stretches and then poke open a new imaginary door to see what’s in there waiting for me. Two days ago it was my knee; yesterday it was the back of my neck. Tomorrow – who knows?

Forty years ago I might have held onto the pain like a mental chew toy – gnawing on it as I considered all the possibilities of what that pain might mean. Every bit of abdominal pain was a potential appendicitis (is that on the right side or the left?). We all eventually come to know our tummy aches. I no longer have an appendix, so one less thing.

I got a cancer diagnosis the day after Christmas 2008. In that very merry phone call, the gynecologist delivered the news and then said, “Stay off Google!”

Of course I did not stay off Google. As a journalist, my nature is to research and question things. When I finally got up the nerve, I poked around on cancer websites, but just superficially. Had I kept looking, I probably would have dug up a dire prognosis. I logged off and decided never to go looking for trouble again.

Talking to friends my age, I find we all have the pain of the day. Some of these friends see doctors often. I choose to adopt the “two-day” approach. I give the twinge a good 48 hours; if it’s still there after that, I allow myself some worry.

So far I’m lucky – my twinges barely make it past day one. By this morning, I’d forgotten about my sore knee, but I thought I might be getting an earache. We’ll see how that one goes.

And the college eye twitch? It lasted almost a full academic quarter all those years ago. I Googled it once: a twitching eye can be the sign of several things – a few serious but most are benign. It’s most commonly caused by stress.

We’ll go with that.