A Hypochondriac's Nightmare
A Hypochondriac's Nightmare
[Cueball at an airport slips on a banana peel and gets sucked into a nearby jet engine.] Cueball (thinking): Seriously!? This is what gets me? I wasted so many hours on WebMD worrying about the rash on my arm!

Hypochondriacs are people who worry obsessively about their health, often looking up symptoms on the Internet and convincing themselves that they have some deadly disease. The situation depicted in this comic is described as a "hypochondriac's nightmare" because Cueball , expecting that the rash on his arm was some mysterious undiagnosed disease, spent several hours on WebMD (an online health symptom reference) looking up symptoms, yet ends up dying by slipping on a banana and getting sucked into an airplane engine. Thus he regrets wasting so much time on an ultimately fruitless task rather than something more productive to survival, such as, say, watching out for banana peels lying in front of jet engines, or at the very least, attempting to enjoy life.
The title text (in ALL CAPS thus shouting in despair) adds another level of hypochondriasm. Randall drew this particular joke to soothe his fears and reassure himself that the rash is nothing. But what if that reassurance just makes him not check out the rash, and then it turns out the rash is caused by "death mites " (which do not actually exist [ citation needed ] ) and ultimately kills him when he could have prevented it?
[Cueball at an airport slips on a banana peel and gets sucked into a nearby jet engine.] Cueball (thinking): Seriously!? This is what gets me? I wasted so many hours on WebMD worrying about the rash on my arm!
