In sickness and in health

My cold-from-Styx is nocturnal. It’s still awful during the day, mind you, but around ten o’clock each night it flares up into a hideous, shrieking banshee with blood on its agenda, tormenting me all night long with spasms of coughs that furrow my throat with glass-sharded sickles, snagging my bronchioles on their way up in preparation for embalmment and mummification. And it doesn’t end till the sun comes up. Seriously, my night life has become the stuff of horror flicks. Sleep holds no solace, only misery.

And so I’ve taken up break dancing.

Perhaps it’s a sad state of affairs that anyone who knows in me person would know almost immediately that there’s no way that could ever be true, and the joke is lost on them. :P Break dancing looks cool, but I don’t have enough motivation to put in the practice required to get my body to make those moves.

Heck, I can’t even get my body to spew out this virus and breathe in some good health. The funny thing about being sick is that as soon as you fall ill, you almost immediately forget what it was like to be hale and hearty. And vice versa. Right now I feel like this cold has been my traveling companion through all twenty-four years of my life, like I’ve been apartment-ridden all my life. And as soon as I’m better, I can pretty much guarantee that this sickness will flake off of my memory faster than butter melts on a hot stove.

It’s also a curiosity that the body seems to know what it ought to eat and what it oughtn’t. It’s not like the stomach sends up a menu to the brain, but somehow my body’s known that it should be eating light foods this past week, lots of fruit, not so much on the breads and other sticky, stuffy foods. Sure, my brain knows that too, but my body automatically reassigns its cravings so I don’t even want the “dangerous” food anymore. (That’s one of the things I’m counting on to let me know I’m getting better — when I start craving mashed potatoes, I’ll know I’m on the uphill. ;))

I can’t help but wonder if my imagination is one of the fiends wining and dining this cold — if somehow my thinking about being sick is in some small way helping to keep me sick. And, more pertinently, if thinking about health would make a difference in the positive direction. On the face of it, it sounds kind of hokey, but you never know. (In fact, I was just reading Lewis Thomas’s The Medusa and the Snail last week, and it turns out that in a majority of cases, you can get rid of warts through the powers of thought. It’s pretty much proven. So this isn’t just wishful thinking. :P)

On a more serious note, while this sickness does consume much of my thoughts (which is dratted annoying), I keep reminding myself that I have it easy. There are so many people out there with far greater medical challenges — asthma, paralysis, cancer or any other terminal illness, you name it — that I have no grounds for complaint. They redefine the word “suffering” — I cheapen it. Sure, the sickness seems to expand in my own sphere to fill the available space, but it could be so much worse. And so I feel bad drawing any attention to it. But I still do.

The nightly decision draws nigh: do I try to sleep, hoping against the evidence that I’ll actually sleep and won’t tear my body inside out with my coughing, or do I stay up as late as I can and then wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. so as to minimize my misery? (The corollary is that I would then sleep during the next day to make up for it. Speaking of which, I forgot to do that today. Whoops.)

Nobody wants to read more than a page about sickness, so I’ll stop here. :P Actually, I won’t: here are some health-related quotes I’ve found in my journeys. (Meaning a quick poke around the Quote Garden five seconds ago. ;))

“The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.” — G.K. Chesterton

“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” — Mark Twain

“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.” — Leo Tolstoy

“Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.” — Aldous Huxley

“Health is merely the slowest way someone can die.” — Anonymous

Have you tried Vick’s vapor rub at night? Put it all over your face and your chest to help break things up. It also puts you to sleep.

Also, try a humidifier.

Ben, this is an inspiring post on the power of positive thinking
http://archanaraghuram.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/she-is-positive/.

We ofttimes get so wrapped up in our own afflictions that we fail to harvest the benefit of getting outside of ourselves especially when we are not well. I had a somber wake up call when I visited my doctor a few weeks ago. He was taking a long time chatting with the people in the examination room next door. I had seen the couple in the waiting room. The husband, an older man wearing a silly pipe cleaner Santa hat, was very attentive to his sweet wife during their wait. And now the doctor was being equally attentive and taking his sweet time about it; I was getting a little impatient because I had things that I had to do and was on a tight schedule. Then I realized that the doctor was telling the woman that she was going to die and the three of them were deciding what to do about it. The husband’s silly hat was a brave attempt to be positive in a heart wrenching situation.

Anna: I haven’t yet, but I do seem to be getting better sleep now. And while I still feel sick — the cough’s still here, and so is the other (less socially correct to talk about :P) part — it’s receding enough that I was able to go to work all day today. The road to recovery is underfoot, and that makes me so happy. :)

e: I actually did, for a few nights, but it didn’t seem to do anything. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m immune? :P

Janet: Quite true, and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to pull our attention out from within — sickness has one heck of a gravitational field — and focus it on others. But it does make a difference.