One of my greatest pet peeves is people coughing.
No, seriously.
I know, I know, they’re sick and they can’t breathe and it’s sad and all that. But it’s also terribly annoying. I know I’m horrible for saying it, but it’s true. Every time I’m near someone violently coughing my whole body starts twitching and I just want to punch them in the face.
Don’t worry that my horror for sick sounds is limited to those emanating from other people, however. When I’m sick and my ears itch and hurt, I do this horrible clicking/croaking thing in the back of my throat to make them hurt less. It’s awful. It’s terribly disgusting. I don’t really know if this is something other people do, or if only I sound like a choking walrus when I’m sick. Either way, it only deepens my hatred of being sick in
general.
Not only do I hate being sick, but I’m not even good at it. I don’t really understand being sick. I get incredibly angry at my body’s betraying me- how dare it get sick? Is staying immune from germs really THAT HARD? What are my white blood cells doing all day, anyway? Isn’t that like their ONE AND ONLY JOB? Come on, body. Come on.
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| My white blood cells, slacking instead of working. |
Consequently, I absolutely refuse to alter my life plans to accommodate sickness. I hate sitting around, especially if it’s sitting around to be sick. What a colossal waste of time. Following this dogma of rest avoidance, I took all of my midterms freshman year of college practically dying from the flu and choking down “emergency” alongside my roommate.
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| This was real life. |
This philosophy of ignoring sickness is further illustrated by the following incident that took place when I was about ten. My family went on a camping trip with some family friends, and as I was young enough to still pretend that I liked things like leaves and woods and dirt (silly me), I trekked through the woods with the other kids around the same age. A day later, everyone left the campsite unharmed. At least, that’s what I hear happened.
I’m unsure, because I woke up with my face so swollen I couldn’t open my eyes. My face was a giant, red, oozing polyp. After visiting a dermatologist (my mother was concerned that every ounce of estrogen in my body had suddenly burst forth in a glowing rush of puberty and my face had become a giant acne fest overnight), it was determined that I had poison ivy. ON MY FACE.
This experience gave me the opportunity to a) tangibly glimpse exactly what I would look like if I was forty pounds heavier, and b) chronically pinpoint a time in my life that I still absolutely did not give an f about what other people thought. I don’t know if it amazes me more that my mother let me leave the house or that my dance teacher wasn’t so horrified by my appearance she refused to let me into class. This was, of course, also the day that one of the dance moms decided to take some informal class pictures. (Did I, in my prepubescent, monster-resembling, itchy state demurely step out of these pictures? Nope. No such sense of self-preservation had been nurtured yet, apparently.) Unfortunately for you, I do not have a copy. Unfortunately for some child somewhere, she does.
I blame this, like most of my dysfunctional personal habits, on my mother.
My mom hates doctors and medicine with a force that is impressive in its intensity. I sincerely hope that before she suffers from any kind of illness requiring serious medical attention, she is old and frail enough to be easily manhandled into the hospital. Historically, my mom has voluntarily entered hospitals for one purpose, and that is to give birth. She packs ahead, signs all the papers that state she won’t sue the hospital if she passes out on her way back to the car from checking out early, and never stays more than one night- if that.
It wasn’t until some of my friends started having babies a few years ago that I realized it isn’t perfectly normal and expected behavior for a woman to be up cooking dinner the day after having pushing a small human out of her body (without painkillers, nonetheless). The first time I visited a person who had just given birth in the hospital who wasn’t my mother, I nearly passed out from fear at the site of her. Albeit it somewhat irrational in her fear of sterilized medical environments and borderline-robot in her intensely high pain tolerance, my mom is clearly pretty hardcore, and inevitably set me up for failure in womanhood. (Although, there is a chance I will turn out just like her- according to the gynecologist I saw at 16, my reproductive system is “textbook perfect”- how marvelous.)
Thanks to my mother, I now have to use a decision making flow chart to determine my level of sickness:
Thursday morning, I woke up making that horrific clicking sound. Checked my way through the chart. Stood up, watched the room spin around me, and went to get ready for work.
This took three hours.
I’m a pretty slow-moving person in the mornings on a normal day, but my sluggishness was previously unmatched. I fumbled about my apartment, trying to get ready and failing. I would go to my drawers to get something, forget what I needed, shuffle away, clickity clack in my throat, get angry at myself for clickety clacking, think about going to work, think about not going to work, remember what I needed, shuffle back to the drawers. Over and over and over. My cold-infested head was so foggy I felt both intoxicated and highly medicated (and by checking the chart, you know I was neither).
Three hours late, I showed up to work with a weak voice and fuzzy head. Despite my hours of getting ready, I looked like a zombie. A drunk zombie, with a perpetual “Huh?” look in her eyes, at that. My boss took one look at me and asked why I was even there. Since I felt it would be in poor taste to explain to my boss the complete ludicrousity of using sick days to actually be sick (What happens then when I wake up one day and am just too sad to get out of bed? Or I need a “mental health day” at the fair with friends? What then?!), I just mumbled something incoherent and fumbled my achey and not-caring self to my desk. After asking Jessica if I could borrow her DSM (my stupid cough head kept trying to say DMV- I sincerely hope that is not what I asked her) for research, I sat at my desk for three hours, cancelled my meetings since I would have been essentially useless in them, and then went home.
I decided not to skip volunteer rape crisis counseling training (refer to resting issues above). However, my level of sickness can easily be clarified by what I decided to wear out. I changed from my dress pants into sweatpants, and kept them on. I have never done this in my life. Now, I know that wearing sweatpants and uggs was stylish for a while/might still be/I don’t know or whatever, but I pretty seriously assume this is or was only true in the case of trendy PINK or ROXY sweatpants as sported by high school girls, not when wearing your dad’s old grey sweatpants from when he was in high school as a poor and struggling adult.
SO KEWT <3
I gave myself extra time to get to training, but after the struggle of continually losing my keys and my inability to move any fast than a milliinch (Yeah, I just made up a unit of measurement combining two different unit systems… whatever. Don’t care. Math’s not my thing. Remind me to write a blog post on that one day) a minute. I also called my mom.
Not only is my mom ions more concerned about the physical health of her children than of her own, she also reminded me to take one of her magic pills. My mom goes to some weird vitamin store in town with a magic book of “natural” cures, and doles out unrecognizable but surprisingly successful drugs to us whenever we have an ailment or physical complaint. She also introduced me to fancy B12, which became my legal version of Adderral in college. My mom probably doesn’t know she could probably become a drug dealer to college students, nor does she probably have the desire to, but….
Magic Pills
By the time I got home from training, I was not only regretting my decision to drag my sweatpanted butt into town to watch videos of abused children, I was barely walking or seeing straight. I went home, took three ibuprofen, another magic pill, and got in bed. Somehow, regardless of my degree of illness or how late it is at night, I always end up watching trashy television episodes about teen pregnancy and typing out blog drafts in these situations. I really don’t know how it happens, but I certainly wasn’t putting enough effort into resting to deserve any kind of recovery from my state of pain and suffering, legitimate as it might have been.
At any rate, I woke up Friday, ran through my flow chart, and… check! I was well! I still went into work four hours late, but that’s another story. I was still “recovering.” And I stayed late. So don’t judge me.
Sickness:0
Mom/Magic Pills/Kathleen/Sheer disregard for personal health: 1 (!)
To prevent my mother from stealing all of the attention regarding magic “cure all” cures with her magic pills, I’ll leave you with a secret magical tool of my own:
That stuff will save your life in some other situations. Trust me. Also, trust secret voodoo magic pills, if they’re from my mother.
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