--about that rant; that's part of what these boards are for. A number of us here rant about all sorts of issues on a regular basis (not just our own personal situations and lack of empathy from others but clueless doctors, unthinking media, and the like--I happen to think we're not only informative and helpful in this but often quite entertaining.) And, of course, many of us can relate extremely well.

There is a tendency among "new" patients with less-well known or hard-to-diagnose conditions to be particularly talkative about them, especially early on. It's part of the search for knowledge, and part of the coping mechanism. I imagine, though, that makes such people pretty annoying to those with no particular health complaints--or with complaints that ARE well-known.

People have very different capacities for empathy, and one generally finds out just how different when one needs some empathy.

The saving grace, or the karmic balancing (if one thinks that way), does come eventually; almost everyone, unless they die suddenly in an accident or something like that, will eventually get SOME debilitating condition that will make them ramble on and sound just as boring and self-obsessed as we often do. When that happens, often such individuals learn something about the need for us to treat others with more validation. (I sometimes joke that lucky us just had to learn that sooner.)