He reached home and began to tell his wife about it.She listened, but in the middle of his account his daughter came in with her hat on, ready to go out with her mother.She sat down reluctantly to listen to this tedious story, but could not stand it long, and her mother too did not hear him to the end.
"Well, I am very glad," she said."Mind now to take your medicine regularly.Give me the prescription and I'll send Gerasim to the chemist's." And she went to get ready to go out.
While she was in the room Ivan Ilych had hardly taken time to breathe, but he sighed deeply when she left it.
"Well," he thought, "perhaps it isn't so bad after all."He began taking his medicine and following the doctor's directions, which had been altered after the examination of the urine.but then it happened that there was a contradiction between the indications drawn from the examination of the urine and the symptoms that showed themselves.It turned out that what was happening differed from what the doctor had told him, and that he had either forgotten or blundered, or hidden something from him.
He could not, however, be blamed for that, and Ivan Ilych still obeyed his orders implicitly and at first derived some comfort from doing so.
From the time of his visit to the doctor, Ivan Ilych's chief occupation was the exact fulfillment of the doctor's instructions regarding hygiene and the taking of medicine, and the observation of his pain and his excretions.His chief interest came to be people's ailments and people's health.When sickness, deaths, or recoveries were mentioned in his presence, especially when the illness resembled his own, he listened with agitation which he tried to hide, asked questions, and applied what he heard to his own case.
The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilych made efforts to force himself to think that he was better.And he could do this so long as nothing agitated him.But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease.He had formerly borne such mischances, hoping soon to adjust what was wrong, to master it and attain success, or make a grand slam.But now every mischance upset him and plunged him into despair.He would say to himself: "there now, just as I was beginning to get better and the medicine had begun to take effect, comes this accursed misfortune, or unpleasantness..." And he was furious with the mishap, or with the people who were causing the unpleasantness and killing him, for he felt that this fury was killing him but he could not restrain it.One would have thought that it should have been clear to him that this exasperation with circumstances and people aggravated his illness, and that he ought therefore to ignore unpleasant occurrences.But he drew the very opposite conclusion: he said that he needed peace, and he watched for everything that might disturb it and became irritable at the slightest infringement of it.His condition was rendered worse by the fact that he read medical books and consulted doctors.The progress of his disease was so gradual that he could deceive himself when comparing one day with another -- the difference was so slight.But when he consulted the doctors it seemed to him that he was getting worse, and even very rapidly.Yet despite this he was continually consulting them.
That month he went to see another celebrity, who told him almost the same as the first had done but put his questions rather differently, and the interview with this celebrity only increased Ivan Ilych's doubts and fears.A friend of a friend of his, a very good doctor, diagnosed his illness again quite differently from the others, and though he predicted recovery, his questions and suppositions bewildered Ivan Ilych still more and increased his doubts.A homeopathist diagnosed the disease in yet another way, and prescribed medicine which Ivan Ilych took secretly for a week.
