I’ve been sick all week.
I say that not to elicit the sympathy I won’t get and don’t deserve, nor as a pre-emptive apology for the fever-induced ramblings of this column.
I only mention my misery as a means of vocalizing the epiphany that came to me in a vision – half-awake, half-asleep in a sweating, shivering, NyQuil-fueled delirium.
When you’re an adult suffering from a cold, no one cares.
Oh, it’s not that no one empathizes – family, friends, and co-workers all want you to get better and will cheerily give you the usual aspirin, water, and rest prescription. But let’s be honest – once they find out you only have a cold and aren’t “really” sick, their level of sympathy drops considerably. They’re more interested in the work you’re missing, or the appointments you’re cancelling, or the household duties you’re ignoring – all of which they have to make up for themselves.
When you were a child and caught a cold, you got the royal treatment. Someone was there with spoonfuls of medicines, hot tea, and that chicken soup with the little stars in it. My grandmother would even cut the crust off the toast, a service she’d never perform when I wasn’t sick. I could watch television and read comic books all day and no one asked about homework. Life was good, even if I felt bad.
Fast forward twenty, thirty, or forty years, and catching a cold takes on a completely different meaning.
If you’re married, you have the advantage. You can guilt trip your spouse into catering to your every need, and you know you will. You make any outrageous request you can think of in that pitiful, sickly whine, followed by a violent coughing spasm; and they’re putty in your hands. And they do it, not so much out of guilt, sympathy, or even true love, but because they know that they’ll get sick someday themselves, and paybacks are… well, you know what paybacks are.
If you’re an adult who lives alone, and find yourself facing the seasonal bug, you’re on your own. Now, a smart person, which I’m obviously not, would buy plenty of cold and flu medications on sale, long before they exhibit symptoms, just to have them in the medicine cabinet.
Not me.
I prefer to drag myself - coughing, achy, head pounding and wracked with pain – to the local drug store once it’s clear that I’m not going to get better without the aid of powerful pharmaceuticals. Once there, I snatch whatever is in the cold and flu aisle with abandon, only giving the labels a cursory glance through my blurred double vision. This is a bad idea, not so much because of the potential harm from mixing certain medications, but because I don’t check the prices thoroughly.
When the cashier rings up the purchase, my heart skips a beat, my head clears for a moment and my vision snaps back into clear focus. $38 for cold medicines? Is she kidding? I check the prices, and look at what I bought. She’s not kidding.
With the pain now spread to my wallet, I return home to over-medicate and spend the next couple of days in bed and feeling sorry for myself.
Far from the childhood pleasure it once was, daytime television is a freak show. There’s Maury, where a woman is “1000 percent sure” – yet dead wrong - that the doofus seated next to her is her baby’s daddy, and old reliable Jerry Springer, where yet another toothless gargoyle accuses her boyfriend of cheating on her. I can’t imagine why.
I also can’t imagine why I pay that big corporation downtown more than a hundred bucks a month for 400 channels of absolutely nothing, but that’s a question for another time.
For exercise, I slowly shuffle to the bathroom six times an hour – or if I’m feeling particularly chipper, I make my way to the kitchen and lean my head on the cool refrigerator while the water boils for tea.
I think being sick for a few days is God’s way of reminding us to slow down and enjoy our wellness. On normal days, I never think about the high cost of cold medications, or how the cast of All My Children hasn’t changed since I last saw the show 20 years ago.
My advice: Don’t catch cold. It’s expensive, and downright depressing. Sure, it only lasts a couple of days, but it’s a couple of days you can do without.
For now, I think I’ll go back to bed. Judge Judy is on.
