Being Sick

A whole week of my life disappeared. It began happening on a Tuesday afternoon when everything in my body began to hurt with shards of dull pain. I was cold, then hot, I began to cough, I took ibuprophen and went to bed early, and by morning I had changed my sweat soaked p.j.'s twice. My husband was suffering with the same thing and had actually come down with it a couple of days before me.

I was only faintly sympathetic. (I never get sick! Hey, I got the flue shot and have been vaccinated against whooping cough and pneumonia. No worries.) I made soup, my best effort as Florence Nightingale.

But when I became ill, it really was the worst since I had had Asian flu as a teenager. We moved slowly from room to room seeking flat places to lie supine. The dog loved this choice of super warm bodies to cuddle up to. At one point I was lying quietly upstairs on our grandson's bed, and with so much time and nothing to read, I examined everything in the room: the many post-it notes all over the walls. When did this boy do that? I did not have the energy to go and see what they said and my eyes moved on to an amazingly complicated Lego construction on the table. What ARE these turtles?  Then there are the framed child paintings I have not examined in years, and the large photograph of me as a lovely three year old. This is a strange room. And I can't possibly live feeling like this.

After hauling myself in to see my doctor, who said I had nothing unique, a sinus infection and I should rest, drink chicken soup and take a course of antibiotics I felt no better for several days. We continued to cough and ooze from couch to couch, bed to bed. Sometimes we roused ourselves to make some comfort food, stuff we usually never eat such as mac and cheese, dumplings, more soup. It was too much trouble to go out to the garden and pick a salad. I forced myself to tend to the two hundred tomato and pepper seedlings on the porch. Couldn't let them die! One morning we did four loads of laundry- all those sweaty sheets and pajamas.

Just before we turned the corner I got the idea in my head that I wanted to eat pound cake. No one could possibly make the trip to the store.
And so my husband said he'd make a cake. It took six eggs and a prodigious amount of butter. By the time the cake was nearing doneness, he was clinging to the counter, whipped.  We ate it for dessert after one of our comfort food meals we pretended to enjoy. The cake was actually lovely.

Then, this morning after the freeze, we awoke human again. Maybe not quite well, but the possibility exists. We had things to do, places to go.

I have been hungry all day, eating everything in sight. We both lost so much weight in a week it's scary.

 From one Downton Abbey to the next that I watched from my couch, I seriously began to love Maggie Smith's face and began to think of her as my fashion guru.

I will be more sympathetic from now on with everyone, anyone who just has something non unique that is serious to them. The kids never called, not that we had alerted them. But I did think about the many times I sent them off to school sick and was not entirely sympathetic to the various spots and scabs of their childhood.

Such is life.