Sick Daze

Whew. It’s already mid-November. Thanks and Giving are hovering nearby. Frances and I are beginning to resurface after two? three? four? five? weeks of illness.

I have to say … it’s difficult to be so sick that you can’t think. That was us. To cope we checked out DVDs from the library. Then we sat in our chairs and engaged in hour-upon-hour of mind-numbing entertainment. And, amazingly, we WERE temporarily distracted from our illnesses as long as we were in the middle of a heart-pounding segment of “24” or another serial murder in “Dexter.” So now we’re up-to-date on the TV and ShowTime offerings for another year.

My sister-in-law asked me if our nutrition was good while we were sick. It was, I suppose, the best nutrition you can get when you’re both ill, you can’t visit the grocery store, and you don’t have the energy to cook. I floated my body in glasses of water. I quit drinking coffee. I ate most of the fresh fruit we had available from a local orchard, i.e., one bag of apples and one bag of pears (“An apple a day.…”). I made a huge pot of chicken soup then ate a bowl a day until I thought I’d turn into a noodle or a chicken … or both.

Now I have more understanding for people who don’t want to stay home when they’re sick. It takes a lot of patience to see the same walls, the same person, the same Kleenex box, and the same messy rooms for days on end. It takes tremendous fortitude to eat the same food and go through the same routine (lying down, coughing, sitting up, sneezing, walking around, coughing, lying down again, drinking, eating, coughing, napping, sneezing, ad nauseam).

I hope that everyone who gets sick this fall/winter stays home. Stay-at-home zombies are a lot easier to take that the kind that circulate around the community spreading their viruses to others.

Be kind. Take time to heal yourself before you infect others.

[This is a public service announcement from your local health care provider, Same Spirit Healing Arts LLC.]