And how are you feeling today?

However you feel, don't tell Akaky at the Passing Parade:

THE MAY STORM: This morning my Aunt May was complaining again…well, let me rephrase that a little, since my using the word again might, simply by definition, cause the reader to infer that Aunt May has, at some hitherto undocumented and therefore constituting one fairly humongous suspension of disbelief, point in her life stopped complaining about whatever the annoyance of the day was and had a conversation about politics, religion, the economy, sports, sex, her husband, her kids, the dog, or some other subject that either could not, would not, or otherwise did not lend itself to the usual metamorphosis into a long list of grievances, said grievances aired at length and then discussed in excruciating detail by herself. [ ]
her prolonged jeremiads against the fates that hate her so much, and with good reason, if you ask me, usually begin with how bad her health is these days.[ ]

It’s strange to think that I have known this woman for more than forty years now and in all that time I don’t think she’s enjoyed good health for more than two hours straight at any given time; we do not, as a society, appreciate how much hypochondria can be a life’s vocation, even, in the best of cases, raised to the level of art.

Working in the library, we often got to know gruesome physiological details of various patrons' health. When I saw one of my staff cornered, I usually summoned him or her to my office, thus liberating him or her.

I did however, get cornered by a board member who had suffered an abdominal complaint. She waa my boss, and there was no one to summon me into the office, so I had to listen--until the point where she mentioned the mucus in her, shall we say, stool?--after which I remembered a letter which urgently needed to be written.