have headache = have brain tumour?

I'm a little bit of a hypochondriac. OK, generally, if I get an ache or pain, I go straight to the Internet and self-diagnose, and generally the consensus is, "Great. I have cancer. I'm going to die."

It's been six days since we stepped off the plane after a 13 hour flight from Singapore back to London.

Ever since then, I've had this tingling weird thing going on with my leg. Kind of like pins and needles, but also kind of like its dead. It feels like I have a ghost leg. I haven't slept for five days because the tingling keeps me awake.

Most roads on the Internet lead to syphilis or brain tumours. If you search for "why is my hair doing this funny thing," you'll eventually get told that it's because you have cancer, or in rarely creative cases, the Ebola virus.

So for hypochondriacs like me,  it's a proper wind up.
And yet, I'll take to Yahoo! Answers.com like a little bitch and when someone called 'LaShawn LaCahones' writes "OMG my leg is tingling, imma gonna die ryt?" And someone called 'AC-Coolx67' says, "Yeah, dude that means you have non-reversable gonorrhoea," I generally believe this shit.

Because there's a 0.001% chance it might be true.

So, up until last night, I genuinely thought I was going to lose a leg. And/or have chronic diabetes. And/or have deep-vein thrombosis. And/or need a peg leg. (Will my husband still love me if I have a pirate-shiver-me-timbers peg as a leg?)

One thing was made certain, and that was my leg is clearly going to be the end of me, according to the Internet Superhighway. Horrible, gangrene type death that is hardly dignified for a lady.

So while panicking, bleating every five minutes about the gammy fucking leg, I thought I'd ride it out in the hope it got better after a few days. You know, test death. Dice with death in the most bolshy of terms.

(For sometimes, neurotics, like to play with fire.)

Now, the thing with the NHS in England is this: you get to go to the doctor for free. This is both amazing and interesting. Because for highly strung people like me, I now actually go to the doctor.
In South Africa, when I didn't have medical aid, I once lay in bed with pneumonia because I thought I could get over it myself.  (I couldn't, it turned out.)

Now, sore head? Weird tingling in leg? Cough? I go to the doctor. We can debate the pros and cons of free state healthcare elsewhere, but for once, I side with the socialists on this one.

I thought I'd check out the Internet one more time, before going though. I went to the NHS website and did a little test called the 'Symptom Checker.' ( Involved questions about the tingling, colour, etc.)

Well. Nothing kicks of a spate of uncontrolled blood pressure than this little conclusion:

I went to the doctor. Like, twenty minutes later.

Crisis, "call an ambulance?"

The prognosis is that I have damaged a nerve behind my knee from the flight (read: sitting in economy), and it'll take a few weeks to go down. I am swallowing anti-inflammatories like a motherfucker.* 

*Probs won't die though. Of this. 
 ** Oh and to conclude: Don't travel economy. Life or death situation just there.