IHS: Do You Have It?

I have always been a fan of comics and magazines. When I was younger it was the Beano and Dandy. Our dog Danny and Bert made it into the Beano . I'd sent a photograph of Bert and Danny playing on the beach and totally forget I'd even done it. Months later the next door neighbours knocked on our door to tell us and we went out to the shops to buy about 5 copies of it, all of which are lost now.

As I got older it chnaged to magazines such as Just 17, whih I started reading when I was 13 and stopped when I was 15. I remember flicking through copies of Nellymoms' Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan and thinking they were magazines for 35 year olds butI got into Cosmo just a few years ago and realised there is a lot to be learnt from it.

It was about the same time I got into Cosmo that I started reading magazines like Now and Heat. These are the trashiest magazines ever. Or at least that's what I thought until venturing out in the land of Chat and Take a Break. The reason I started to read these types of magazines is because I had this idea that I would become a professional competition enterer. I read in another magazine about a women who entered 60 competitions a week and was always winning free holidays and washing machines. That sounds like a good job I thought. But I grew bored very quickly and bought the magazines, did the puzzles but never got round to sending them off. Posting things is something I've always had trouble with. I can write a letter or buy a present no problem but when it comes to posting it it can take me months. I don't why.

So I had all these trashy magazines lying around and I couldn't help but read the articles. They sucked me in with their headlines screaming I Hacked My Toyboy Lover into a Thousand Pieces and Fed Him to His Parents. But what really got me about these magazines was the health pages and stories about normal everyday people's battles with rare diseases and such things. It got me thnking about all the unusal ailments out there and all the uusual ailments there could be. Like for example; what if you suffered from a condition where you couldn't eat anything because whatever you ate tasted so bad when you burped it again later that it would make you throw up. What makes me laugh about these things aswell is the names they give for people's ailments. It's always something something syndrome. Like Itchy Head Syndrome (IHS) or Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). FAS is actually a real one. I read about a guy having a stroke and he recovered completely except that he spoke with a foreign accent. The great thing is though, when people have had a mystery illness like this for years and it is finally diagnosed (quite often with no known cure for it), people say they are just happy to finally know what's been bothering them. Now if that was me I'd say, 'Right, so I've got Itchy Head Syndrome? And there's no cure for it? I don't believe you. You're just making this up.'