in sickness and in health
I’ve been spectacularly sick with stomach flu over the past few days. A virulent bug that hit half my family last week came for the other half of us this week. This bout of illness was, in fact, the first time I’d really been sick the entire year, which means that when I call it spectacular, that was how it felt to me. I had become so cocky about my good health that even a few hours of being flattened by an unhappy digestive system felt disastrous to me, let alone a couple of days. Somewhere in the back of my mind I am aware that in the grand scheme of things for many people in the world, this sort of fleeting bug is nothing. I’m back on my feet, basically functional, and able more or less to keep food down after two days’ MC. That’s no small thing. I’m lucky to be a very healthy average human being, relatively speaking; but then again when the relativity is to my own baseline, it’s been rough.
An illness is always a reminder of the fact that we are physical beings, the kind of reminder that sits in that no-man’s-land between unwelcome and needed. I would never call any illness welcome, but when I’m in the thick of it, I always think, this is probably what I needed to remember.
When I wasn’t sleeping it off, I didn’t have the energy to watch things or game (the nausea made any kind of moving picture very unpleasant), so I spent my sick days reading. I devoured the first three Detective Galileo novels and Richard Osman’s new book We Solve Murders, all of which were great and which I thoroughly recommend if you’re a mystery novel enjoyer. It’s been a long time since I devoted entire days to nothing but books. It felt like coming home. There really, truly is nothing like the feeling of getting lost in another world between you and the page.