Friday, August 27, 2010

The Battle is being waged.

I don’t cope well with being sick. My whole body gets involved and beaten up rather badly every time a virus comes along and decides that this section of the playground (AKA the “human race”) is now ITS turf, demands my body’s lunch money and tells it to do its homework for it.
My body, being a brave little trooper, valiantly says “NO! This is MY turf and you can’t have my lunch money and you can do your own stupid homework!”, and blows a raspberry at the offending bug before the scene cuts and the next shot is of me, lying on the couch in a sea of tissues and looking like I’d just been hit by a truck. Or three.
This wasn’t such an issue when I was a kid, because I’d stay home from school and suffer along merrily while being taken care of for as long as I was being beaten and bullied by the nasty, microscopic insurgents.
These days, it’s more like guerilla warfare. We circle each other, we hide, we take our shots when we can. Then, wounded, we hide again until the next day when the battle starts afresh. 
I have to pick my moments, and decide carefully what I need to do and when I can do it. When the enemy is sleeping so that I can sneak past it and buy groceries, or when they’re most distracted by the flare I threw at them (Strepsils, in this case) so that I can teach the class without sounding like Lurch from The Addams Family.
Despite an increased ability to get on with things, being a grown-up and being sick is still a hard war to fight. It is made even more difficult by the fact that you can no longer launch a full-on assault of constant rest and hot soup. You are now playing chess with the enemy, anticipating the next move and hoping to out-do them before they out-do you.
You could write novels (or movie scripts) based on this stuff.

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