Being Sick Sucks!



My first born is student teaching kindergarten this year, and has come down with a few nasty bugs herself from the darling little germ incubators. “It is to be expected”, I tell her and that soon she’ll build up antibodies to all those new elementary school coodies. But for now having the crud is par for the course. She’s a trooper that one, and pushes herself to the reasonable limit of her body resources. So when she does call in sick, you know there was simply nothing more she could have done. You can imagine her surprise when someone said to her — “You are so lucky you got to stay home sick.” She raised an eyebrow and dropped her jaw not really knowing how to respond.

So just to make it clear for anyone who has been blessed with good genes, a strong immune system and the obvious luck of the draw —

BEING SICK SUCKS!

But even beyond other people’s expectations, those of us who struggle with a life limiting illness sometimes forget ourselves as we make an under-the-radar-assumption that life will get easier as I just get “better at being disabled.”

I realize the paradigm of illness is not unique in this regard. It’s always easier if only we had more time, energy or willpower. In my early 20’s I thought things would be easier when I got that next raise. But each year my salary increased it seemed I just bought a higher grade of meat at the market. I went from stocking-up on tuna helper to moving-up to a seven bone foil wrapped roast. Later still, food bills became college funds and health care costs ate away at my financial liquidity. All good investments I am certain (ok, not for the cow or the albacore, but I made amends with that more than a decade ago.) Yet at the end of day it was still a mystery that the more money I earned, never put more money in my pocket.

Whatever it is that we struggle with and indeed over time we may swap money for illness or addiction for depression, there is this misnomer that somehow things will get better when __(fill-in-the-blank)__. So even though I no longer have committee meetings and academic deadlines to meet — I still find myself up against unmanageable circumstances which cause those same feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.

Some version of … if its not one thing, its another.

So as I find myself in an all to familiar POTShole, having dropped seven pounds in three days all that I can do is rest (which the body mandates with an orthostatic pulse of 150+ during these dark times) drink heavily salted and mineral rich fluids and wait to see how long before I can find another paved road and perhaps even a rest stop up ahead.

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