As a general rule, I don’t get sick. I have allergies and asthma, but do OK on over the counter medications. I think being on those continuously keeps me from catching every little bug that comes down the pike. I have a friend who religiously got her flu shot every year. And every year, she got the flu. The year they offered the pneumonia shot, guess what she got — the shot and pneumonia. Every year, she’d ask if I got my flu shot and then answer herself with “Oh yeah, you don’t get the shot, you just get sick.”
Hardly. I can literally count on one hand the number of times an illness has taken me out of commission — sidelined me from my life.
In the eighth grade (1978), I developed an ulcer and was hospitalized for a couple weeks. They had me on a bland diet and I just kept getting sicker and losing more weight. I could handle the weight loss as I was a chunky kid. My great-grandmother always said I was “solid.” Basically, the boiled potatoes the hospital was feeding me for like every meal was killing me. I didn’t start getting better until my sister began sneaking in pizza, cheeseburgers and chocolate. But I lost a couple weeks of my life, along with about 25 pounds.
I was 32 years old when Dave and I and our 5-year-old son got very ill with a stomach virus. I was too sick to take care of myself, let alone those two. Thankfully, I was blessed with a doting family. My mom came and took “the baby” to her house to be cared for by my grandma and my dad. She came back to my house to take care of me and Dave. We were both too sick to get out of bed, except to maybe crawl to the bathroom. The only thing I remember from the whole week was Mom catering to us with chicken soup and white pop, but being very skittish about coming in our room with both of us in bed. Different generations, I guess.
A couple years later when our son was in grade school, he got chicken pox. My mom and I spent a week caring for him and the following week, I was in a Benadryl fog. Did you know you can get chicken pox in your 30s? Me neither. Apparently, it’s quite dangerous and can even be deadly. I spent a week on the couch, waking only now and again to Mom or Dave handing me the phone to talk to the doctor. He called me every day. Wow.
I was good for the next 20 to 25 years or so, with no debilitating illnesses striking until Dave and I were both laid low by another stomach virus around Christmas a couple years ago. We missed the holiday party and everything. At least we were capable of taking care of ourselves and good thing too, because my parents and my grandma are long gone.
October of this year slipped by me like a warm summer night. Gone in a heartbeat thanks to a sinus infection brought on by a perfect storm of inferior sinus medicine and dust.
I had been having a hard time finding my regular sinus pills at the store — any store. OK, so I’ll do like everybody else in the world now and order them online. Same ingredients, nice price and delivered in no time. But they weren’t doing much for me. I was more and more congested all the time. And that’s when the weather took a turn for the worse.
I had to put away our tank tops and shorts and dig out our flannels and light sweaters that have been stored since spring.
Dust — my arch nemesis — and essentially having had no sinus meds for about two weeks. I was felled by a wicked sinus infection. I called off work because I couldn’t even get up. It’s OK, I’ll be fine by tomorrow. I took some over the counter cough medicine in a failed attempt to quell the constant gut-wrenching coughs. I couldn’t sleep and Dave couldn’t either with all that coughing. So I stayed on the couch. May I note that overnight TV programming is far superior to what is offered in the evenings. I called off work for a second day and figured I’d be fine by Monday with the weekend to recover. I wasn’t. I was dying. I told our son so as he stood over me in my bedroom. I still couldn’t even get up. I couldn’t stop coughing. I hadn’t eaten in a couple days. He left and returned a bit later with bottles of electrolytes, ready made soup cups and protein shakes. After some of that stuff, I thought I might actually live, but I couldn’t do much but stay on the couch.
I called off work for a third day, something that hadn’t happened since that chicken pox episode in the ’90s. Dave drove me to my doctor’s appointment and we picked up my scripts. I don’t even know what the pill was for but after the first couple doses, I knew I better be lying down when I took it. The cough medicine was about the same. Like swallowing gasoline and then waking up sweating a couple hours later. If I coughed, I didn’t know it. I didn’t even know if I was breathing for sure.
I was on the couch for the next four or five days and finally started taking back control of my life on Saturday. I got back to work the following Monday with residual congestion and minimal coughing. I survived. That was a toughie, but you have to admit being really sick only a handful of times in 50 years is still a pretty good run. I’m totally knocking on wood right now but still have no plans to get a flu shot.
