I have been out of pocket a while because I was battling Influenza B, one of the strains of the flu virus that has been plaguing the nation for months now.
The flu brings with it a variety of nasty irritations. Fever, chills, headache, sore throat, a hacking cough, weakness, and just a general feeling of, Lord, please help me!
The strains this year have included additional problems such as strep throat, pneumonia, and in some cases, sepsis, a sometimes deadly collection of bacteria and toxins in the bloodstream. My worse symptoms were a searing sore throat from two small ulcers caused by the flu virus and an accompanying ear and neck ache.
I felt very fortunate to have Ingrid and Claudia bringing me soups and good things to eat and making sure I was still alive. My sons, Caleb and Luke, kept up with me, offering to come to my rescue if I needed them. I had great friends from Hamilton checking on me daily. And I had coworkers who called to see if I was faking or really sick. I coughed for them.
On my first trip to the doctor, I sat in the waiting room surrounded by affliction. People were coughing. And not just a little polite cough, but hacking, loud, uncontrolled convulsive sorts of coughs. A couple of people were wearing surgical masks. No one felt like talking. Most had their heads down in obvious misery. A teenage girl wrapped in a bulky coat looked wearily into her cell phone but she wasn’t texting or even browsing. Just staring at it, frozen in boring discomfort.
A grandmother and her little granddaughter came in. The little girl was maybe 7 or 8. Her face was flushed and she had a croupy cough. After they checked in at the desk and got settled in their seats the grandmother tried to get the child to put on a mask. She held it for a while, then put it to her nose, then put it down. She didn’t quite see the necessity. Meanwhile, grandmother was on the cell talking to mom. I could hear her say the school had called and said the little girl had a fever and cough and needed to be picked up. So I guess the grandmother drove to school and got her and then brought her to the doctor’s office. She was so sweet to her granddaughter, talking softly to her, moving her hair out of her face, holding her close. The little girl was restless and chatty. I couldn’t understand everything but she was so cute, although I could see she didn’t feel well.
I thought of all the people who have no one to care for them when they are ill. Those homeless souls on the streets, fighting cold and the elements while suffering a fever, chills, and the agonies of the flu or pneumonia or sepsis.
I thought of the elderly, alone in their homes, or abandoned in a nursing center with no family. People need comforting when they are ill. Most of us want a certain amount of privacy, not hovering, and endless questions, but just to be cared for. Someone to put their hand on our head or sit beside us for a moment. There is warmth in that, a kind of human luxury we all need.
When I was a boy in grade school I often got tonsillitis. I’m not sure why no one else in the family seemed to get it. But I’ve always been vulnerable to a sore throat. I remember my maternal grandparents lived down the street from us. I adored them. What loving people they were. I hated swallowing capsules of antibiotics when I got sick so my grandmother would come to the house and break open the capsules and mix the contents into a spoon of warm water, put a little sugar in it, and give it to me. The rest of the family looked on with a kind of sniffing, Really?? But I loved that my grandmother pampered me that way. I thought of her last week when I was piled on the sofa, my throat throbbing from ulcers, and my body aching from the flu.
Sickness is a part of life, though most of us think of it as some kind of shortcoming. We forget how mortal our bodies are, in spite of their remarkable durability. We may get angry when we are ill, blaming our body for letting us down. Or we may stress over being sick to the point we delay our natural ability to recover.
But a period of illness can be transformative, reminding us of the magnificence of good health, the beautiful support of family and friends when health fails, and the opportunity to rest our tired bodies and let them heal. Writer Susan Sontag called illness “the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship.” She held that we all have a dual citizenship, one in the land of the well, and one in the land of the sick. And though we all prefer to stay in the first, we are all obligated “to identify ourselves with the citizens of that other place.”
Our illnesses can deepen our humanity, helping us be better caretakers of ourselves, and others.
© 2018 Timothy Moody
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