Thursday, January 13, 2000
Reasons to Be Sick - To LTF
A funny story about being sick: For several weeks before Thanksgiving our household was overwhelmed with home improvement projects, conceived by Mom and executed by me. She could think faster than I could achieve, and I started to sink. Then, a week and a half before Thanksgiving, she pinned MPS down about The Family Dinner and volunteered not only our house, but all the food ("MPS is so busy she can't see straight," Mom says, which was, and still is, true, "and I can make the turkey and the pies.").
I was not happy. It was becoming clear to me that Mom was interested in a Thanksgiving feast, but was not interested in remembering how to cook it, which meant I'd be doing it. So, about a week before Thanksgiving, with an inside house painting and an outside carport repair coming up, I rhetorized, out loud, "Wouldn't it be nice if I got really sick, just for a couple of days, so I could stay in bed and suffer and sleep?"
Three days later I had my wish. For the first time in my life I caught the flu; such a bad case of it I thought that it wasn't the flu, it was something like the plague or the Hanta virus, and I was surely going to die. Because of everything that was coming up, I spent less time in bed than I would have liked (and probably needed), lots of time trying to battle a fever and breathe while moving furniture, sanding a roof, juggling a 22 pound turkey-and-fixings and inhaling paint and primer (which are worse than paint) fumes. I remained seriously ill until the week before Christmas. As my mother (who almost died of the flu during her first year of teaching, back in the very late thirties) said, "The flu is no fun". That, by the way, is all the sympathy I got from her, which is one of the things I like about her; when she responds to a person's needs, she is both generous and practical, but never sentimenal. The funny thing is, when I needed a day off from school when I was little, I used to fake being sick because I never got sick. As an adult, I stopped faking sick for work and called in "mentally ill". Until "mental health days" became popular (which was about the time I stopped working in the business world), everyone was too flabbergasted to respond, "Come in anyway". I guess the difference between childhood and adulthood is that, when you wish you were sick, the body cooperates with the viruses and bacteria and demons.
I was not happy. It was becoming clear to me that Mom was interested in a Thanksgiving feast, but was not interested in remembering how to cook it, which meant I'd be doing it. So, about a week before Thanksgiving, with an inside house painting and an outside carport repair coming up, I rhetorized, out loud, "Wouldn't it be nice if I got really sick, just for a couple of days, so I could stay in bed and suffer and sleep?"
Three days later I had my wish. For the first time in my life I caught the flu; such a bad case of it I thought that it wasn't the flu, it was something like the plague or the Hanta virus, and I was surely going to die. Because of everything that was coming up, I spent less time in bed than I would have liked (and probably needed), lots of time trying to battle a fever and breathe while moving furniture, sanding a roof, juggling a 22 pound turkey-and-fixings and inhaling paint and primer (which are worse than paint) fumes. I remained seriously ill until the week before Christmas. As my mother (who almost died of the flu during her first year of teaching, back in the very late thirties) said, "The flu is no fun". That, by the way, is all the sympathy I got from her, which is one of the things I like about her; when she responds to a person's needs, she is both generous and practical, but never sentimenal. The funny thing is, when I needed a day off from school when I was little, I used to fake being sick because I never got sick. As an adult, I stopped faking sick for work and called in "mentally ill". Until "mental health days" became popular (which was about the time I stopped working in the business world), everyone was too flabbergasted to respond, "Come in anyway". I guess the difference between childhood and adulthood is that, when you wish you were sick, the body cooperates with the viruses and bacteria and demons.
