For six months the flu has been hovering over my body like Winnie The Pooh’s black cloud, just waiting to descend when I’m most vulnerable. Two nights ago it hit me like a brick wall colliding with a gnat and within thirty minutes I felt it overtake my body. Splat. (I’m the gnat.)
I waited out yesterday just in case it was one of those twenty-four hour things where you go to sleep and wake up peachy, but when I woke at three a.m. wondering who stuck a wad of bubble gum up my nose I knew it was only going to get worse. My lungs felt like they’d been deflated into tiny raisins and could take in no air. My head…of Lord, my head…the pounding between my eyes was indefinable. I lay in bed listening to the man breathe louder than I ever thought humanly possible wondering if I could stuff the wad of bubble gum up his nose. I played around on my phone for a while and just when I thought I would drift off, the coyotes outside my window decided to play a three part harmony. Earplugs to the rescue, I was able to fall sleep around five. Until six.
The man made up for his breathing patterns by getting all seven kids ready for school and I lay in bed like Cameron on Ferris Buelers Day Off when he’s sick in bed. “When Cameron was in Egypt lannnnnddd…let my people gooooo.” (only you children of the 80’s will get that…)
Now in the past I’ve always been one of those people who refuses to admit she is sick. I mean, moms don’t GET sick, right? They can’t. The world will stop spinning or at the very least, the washing machine will…
So normally I wait until weeks have passed and I’ve become like the leper they banish to the island and the family demands I go to the doctor. Well…this week is different. I’ve got way too much to do to be sick. So I made the call. Yes, they had an opening, could I be there in ten minutes. I live in the boonies, I say, so they schedule me for an hour and a half later. Done.
I showered and shaved my legs, just in case I ended up in the stirrups. I know…just a cold…but in my experience, you enter the doctors office and they hog-tie you into those contraptions no matter what. It’s a precaution worth taking in case the doctor is like that hot Noah guy on ER. I wanna be ready.
I climb in the van, buckle myself in and Dan The Man say’s, “Where’s your camera bag?”
“Leave it,” I say, delirious from what was supposed to be Dayquil but I suspect was arsenic.
“Leave it? He says…incredulous. “You must be really sick! We could see Big Foot or something!”
“You’re right,” I say, falling back out the door onto the ground. I wobble inside, grab my camera and off we go.
An hour later I’m sitting in one of those little rooms after having taken a college level final on my medical history. Who has any clue if their great grandmother had a history of mental illness or not and what does this have to do with my snotty nose? I love filling those things out for my adopted kids. I just make new shit up every time. It gives the doctors something to do. “Oh, my, seventeen members of your family had their leg amputated AND nocturnal enuresis?”
Anyway, so the doctor comes in and looks nothing like Noah. I mean she’s not bad looking, and in a pinch…but I was pretty sick so I didn’t care. I’d just been through the weighing part which they always do in the hallway outside the room. As I stand there watching her move that little weight up one notch…and up one more, I imagine they put it out in public like that so they can have some kind of New York Stock Exchange betting pool going on behind your back, guessing how much you’ve gained since your last visit.
By the time she walked in the room carrying her little clippy board, I was drifting off over last month’s People magazine. (Why don’t Jennifer and Brad just get back together, already?)
She listened to my chest and back; gagged me with a stick; banged on my knees; jabbed my ear with that little cone thingy they use to make us think they can actually see something in there; and talked to me about my bowel movements.
“Are your movements green?”
Uhmmmm…how do you answer this? Do you admit to having examined the stuff or play ignorant?
“It might have been,” I played it safe.
“Well, was it bright green?”
“I’m…not…sure,” I told her, “but if you can give me one of those little paint sample swatches I can try to get you a good match.”
She scribbled on her little clippy board and I imagined she was doubling my bill.
I sat there a bit longer counting the throbbing pulses in my temples as she droned on about washing my hands and keeping my hubby on his own side of the king size bed so he didn’t get sick. I fantasized about the Z-Pack she would surely hand over, or maybe it would be Tami Flu…good stuff. I couldn’t wait to pop a pill and get better.
“So, we’re done here,” she says. “Drink lots of water.”
Water? Was that all she was giving me, “drink lots of water?”
That’s right. There was nothing wrong with me, at least nothing curable with a quick triple dose of pink pills.
A shower, a leg shaving, an hour drive, a very personal prodding and a discussion about the hue of my poo and I didn’t even have so much as a low grade fever as evidence of my demise.
So I came home and chewed three cloves of garlic, downed some cold medicine and sat back to write this. Could have saved my $152 bucks, kept my hairy legs and stayed in bed all day, but I wouldn’t have had anything to write about, would I?
Have any of YOU gotten a cold virus this season? What kinds of home remedy’s do you use…I could use some advice!
