A strange thing happened last week. I caught a cough, cold and fever -- the symptoms of which were sneaking up on me for days -- and then I mysteriously got well the following night.
This sounds like a pretty mundane detail in my life (possibly because life has been pretty uneventful lately) but the last time I became sick was actually a few years ago with flu-like symptoms (high fever, aches and pains, etc.), a bad cold and a really bad cough (the kind that makes you feel you're developing a six-pack along the way, which actually would have been a nice side-effect...). I usually get sick for a full week.
But now that I'm looking back, I haven't really caught any major bug in my past ten years in the US. Last year, I had a false cancer alarm (I changed my main physician since). I've had no major injuries also. Knock on wood.
Last week, I was dismissing the cold symptoms, even as I felt the fever coming in. The day I decided that I was sick and not just having a bad day, I started Googling for swine flu symptoms. A website stated that high fever was sometimes absent -- which alarmed me because my fever was mild or non-existent. The other symptoms that I didn't have were vomiting, loss of appetite and muscle weakness.
So that night, I ruled out vomiting and loss of appetite. Since I didn't exert any substantial physical effort that Wednesday, I propped my Iron Gym at my room's doorway ("turns every door into your own personal gym!" -- I laughed for probably a full minute when I heard that line). Pull-ups are difficult for me -- I usually start at 8 repetitions and settle for 7 or 6 for the next two sets. So I did just 7, felt normal, stopped obsessing over swine flu symptoms, and went to bed.
This turned out to be a pretty silly test, because the following day, Thursday, I was sore with flu-like aches and pains -- but then I couldn't figure out if my arms and back were sore because of the flu or because I did pull-ups.
The cold, coughing and slight fever went on for during Wednesday, and I avoided interaction with people as much as I could -- warning people who, I had to talk to in person, trying not to hold on to things like elevator walls and cubicle partitions, etc. I busied myself with work and browsing for anything related to Rolleiflexes and twin lens cameras, colognes, etc. (my current obsessions the past few months or so).
Evening was coming and for the first time and I was starting to feel the cold. I looked out of my window down the street and it was sunny, so I turned up the temperature in the room. I concluded my fever actually got worse.
So in the evening when I got off the subway close to home, I was quite a bit weaker and colder but I forced myself to buy orange juice and some bread. I took Theraflu and passed out by 9pm even as my landlord was knocking on my door and ringing my phone to remind me to leave the keys for the superintendent who was going to fix my bathroom faucet the following day.
I had this vision that one of the stuffed animals in my apartment were volunteering to buy more medicine -- nothing unusual -- and then dozed off in sweat pants and a fleece sweater under a comforter.
I woke up an hour earlier because of the discomfort of sweating, cleaned myself up, and went back to bed normally. I was rehearsing in my head what excuse I was going to use to either not come to work or be at work really late.
Then, the following morning, I was almost perfectly well. It must have been the 10 hours of sleep or the Theraflu.
My current theory is that because I've been sick so often from my childhood to my adult years (from minor colds, to delirious flu, bronchitis, etc.) that I slowly developed some capacity to fix myself fairly rapidly (by my standards, not by Wolverine-mutant standards). It seems I'm not gifted with the immunity of some people; I complain fairly often - headaches, fever-like symptoms, weakness and dizziness, etc.
Some of my friends say that I just complain too often about little things, but now I'm thinking I always do tend to catch something. But it only turns out to be a false alarm.
Yes, that's probably it. My body has been coping after all. By age 40, I'll have superhuman healing abilities.
. . .
My last conversation with my cousin Anna -- God rest her soul -- was about sickness and pain. I was wondering how she could take all the pain needed to survive her very aggressive form of cancer. I usually called her for a chat at least during the middle of the week (usually on Fridays during my bus ride home) because she had her chemo on Mondays, and common sense told me that you'll usually feel weak and be unable to interact much till the following day.
So, the day after she died in May, I was dazed by the absurdity of the death. Of course, her death, like a lot of other things, was probably absurd only to me (her mom gave me this really weird look when I expressed that I thought she was going to last a little longer). The truth was that she survived for quite a long time, and that she suffered for so long that it was easy to rationalize her passing as a gift. But my logic was that she still had so much to live for. And how come I was always relatively fit and healthy? In my clouded mind, I thought I didn't actually deserve these extra years on earth.
This thought sometimes turns into something darker: People who pass away suffer no more. We people who are still alive are still doing our time. Death was not really the question I was trying to answer. Pain was.
I came to a conclusion on just one thing: God does not give you anything you cannot handle.
Thus, on the tennis court one spring day, when I was asking God how come I was relatively healthy and fit while "better" people suffered all sorts of ailments and problems, I might as well have a looked up at the sky and the clouds would read "because you're a big sissy and you complain too much".
In an absurd sort of way, it made sense. It doesn't take much to beat me down. Some knee pain and a corneal scratch easily reminds me of how fragile our bodies are. I can raise a huge stink about having a mild fever, make faces while drinking Theraflu, and then inconvenience a lot of people by making a big production out of some mild illness.
This jives well with the theory that God hasn't been kind to me because I've been such a great guy. God has been kind to me possibly because my mom -- who's a much better person -- requests it every morning at church and every night while praying the rosary. In the same vein, God keeps me relatively fit and well -- though scaring me with paper bags scraping an eye and cancer false positives -- because I would be a really big baby to everyone around me otherwise. I can live with that.
Moral of the story: Don't be like the biblical Job. Lower your standards and tolerances and don't be so brave in life. Brilliant.
