2011-04-18
Explanation
This comic depicts the anxiety spiral of a hypochondriac lying in bed at night. The man feels some abdominal pain and immediately jumps to the worst-case conclusion: appendicitis. He begins poking the area to check, and when it does not hurt at first, he presses harder until it does. He then interprets the soreness he caused by his own repeated poking as confirmation of his fear, convincing himself his appendix might be ruptured.
The escalation continues as he realizes the new pain from poking might be masking the original pain, sending him into a full-blown panic attack. The final panel delivers the dark punchline: the man is declared dead on arrival from a heart attack -- meaning his anxiety and self-induced stress literally killed him, while the original abdominal pain was presumably nothing serious at all. The comic satirizes how health anxiety and compulsive self-diagnosis can be far more dangerous than the imagined illness itself.