By PAUL VALLEY

She tried to weep quietly, to avoid waking her husband. But inevitably, eventually, he heard and opened his eyes to see her in bed beside him, in tears.

On the bedclothes was her laptop computer, its modem connected to the bedside telephone socket.

It had started with tingling and numbness in her legs. For months she had searched the web in an attempt to find out what kind of disease she had. She ended up in a neurological chat room, and came to a devastating conclusion - she must have multiple sclerosis.

"I was reading what other sufferers had posted there," she says now. "It sounded exactly like what I had. I was sure I was dying."

Indeed, Melissa Woyechowsky was ill. Yet she was not manifesting the early symptoms of MS (exacerbated, she later came to think, by Lou Gehrig's disease and several other self-diagnosed maladies).

Rather, she was suffering from something that was already far more advanced. At the age of 30 she was one of the world's first out-of-control cyberchondriacs.

If hypochondria is the excessive fear of illness, then cyberchondria is that fuelled by the huge amount of medical information that is now available on the internet.

"I had always had a strong predisposition to hypochondria," she now recalls, from the vantage point of having being virtually cured of the ailment.

"My grandmother had this really gross-looking book of symptoms that I used to read. As an adult, I had had numerous Aids tests, even though I knew I wasn't at risk. But the internet was like rocket fuel to my hypochondria.

"For 18 months it took over my life," she says.

At her worst, she was spending five hours a day in multiple sclerosis chat rooms. Her heart was beating so rapidly she was afraid to drive. After several months, she didn't want to go out in public.

"It just took off to the point where I wasn't functional. I would visit the same sites again and again. I was not collecting facts, I was sharing feelings."

Eventually, the internet afforded a solution. She stumbled across a book called Phantom Illness co-authored by a professor of psychiatry, Brian Fallon, which revealed to her the true nature of her ailment. The kind of doctor that she needed to see, she discovered, was a psychiatrist.

Three years on, after hefty doses of therapy and Prozac, she is free of health anxieties "most days." But elsewhere, cyberchondria is strengthening its grip. She is now deluged with e-mails from other sufferers, thanks to the healthanxiety.com website that she has set up to share her cure.