Ok, the following is going to make me sound like a really really really horrible person... I just need to know if anyone else does it, and well, how I can stop it because it makes me feel incredibly guilty.

We are bombarded with statistics about various diseases, such as the proportion of a population likely to develop a certain disease, which age groups are most at risk, and factors likely to affect our likelyhood of developing certain diseases.

I use various different statistics about a certain illness (whichever one I'm obsessing over this week) to try and calculate my 'real life' likelyhood of having that disease.

Probably the most well known is the "1 in 3 of us will have cancer at some point in our lives"

Now I know probability doesn't work like this, but if I'm sat with a group of people, I'm thinking that a third of them will get cancer. So if there's three of us, then one of us will. If there's 6, 2 of us will etc.

Anyway, this brings me to the "I'm a really really terrible person" part...

One of the longest lasting HA worries I ever had was a brain tumour. It kind of fizzled out when I was diagnosed with sinus problems and generally poor eyesight, which between them had been causing most of my symptoms, but it's still there in the back of my mind, popping up whenever I get a headache or something in my vision, or dizzyness, whatever. Anyway, I happen to know the statistical probability of developing a brain tumour at my age (because I used to google everything and I can't seem to forget anything) and I know it's pretty low.

I have recently got a huge sense of relief, however, (really really terrible) from the fact that my housemate had a brain tumour as a child. That sounds terrible, it sounds horrific, like I'm saying I'm glad he suffered like that, and I'm honestly not, but I get a sense of relief a) because he's still alive and living a normal, healthy life, and b) because the odds of developing one are already fairly low, but I can't help thinking that the coincidence if we were BOTH to develop one is much lower.

Now I know probability doesn't work like that, at least not on a day-to-day micro scale. But it still makes me feel better. And that makes me feel awful.

Sorry for the long post.