I got hit with a cold on Tuesday night. I had battled a sore throat all day. I made my way through a long workday sucking on cough drops and chugging water. I could feel my body succumbing to a force out of my control.
At my last meeting of the day I had to ask the woman I was talking to, standing up at a bar-height table, if we could sit down. I was in denial about the possibility of being sick for a few reasons. For one, I never get sick. For two, I had a big work function the next night and there were people who needed me, expected me to be there. I couldn’t be sick.
After my last meeting, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I only had one final stop — the eye doctor at 4.45 p.m. In a few hours, I would be home and I could rest. While waiting for the doctor to see me, I furiously downed another entire water bottle and, out of cough drops, chewed on a piece of gum I’d found at the bottom of my backpack to soothe my scratchy throat. My nose was starting to run and I was exhausted.
The wait was longer than I’d hoped and I dragged my way to the bathroom to pee for the 10th time that day. In my state of semi-alertness, I let a full 18 inches of my knee-length cotton raincoat dunk into the pee-filled toilet bowl. I didn’t even notice until the medical assistant called me into the room. Only then did I realize that the entire butt and half the back of my jeans were wet. I pulled my turtleneck as far as I could over the wet spot and sat down to have my eyes dilated.
By 5.30 p.m. I was done with the eye doctor and fully dragging. As I stepped out into the dark, the streetlights illuminated a heavily rainy sky. “Perfect,” I rolled my eyes to myself, as I walked into the patter in my pee-soaked raincoat. But as I trudged the three blocks to my car I embraced the rain. It woke me up a bit and I had a surge of energy because I was finally heading home.
By the time I got my bags out of the car and made my way to the kitchen, I felt like Katniss after the Battle of the Capitol in the Hunger Games. I was starving, but too tired to eat. My throat was burning and I had started sneezing and feeling congested. But I still didn’t want to acknowledge that I was sick. “I just need to sleep,” I told my partner as I threw my bag down and made my way to the basement guest room. “Once I get some rest I’ll be better,” I shouted to her on my way down.
I huddled under layers of blankets and closed my eyes. It wasn’t even 7.00 p.m. but this feeling was so terrible. I just wanted to escape from it. While I slept my partner went out to get supplies in preparation — Theraflu, cough drops, Throat Coat Tea, cough syrup, chicken soup. Despite all signs pointing towards being sick, I held on to my belief that I just needed a good night’s sleep. I’d be better by morning, at least well enough to attend the massive work function I had the next night.
I set my alarm for 6.15 a.m., my usual wake-up time but knew as soon as I opened my eyes that I’d lost the battle. My throat was on fire. My nostrils were full. My head hurt and I was still exhausted after almost twelve hours of sleep. I came upstairs and took a COVID test. Maybe I could still figure out how to salvage my day and my event if the test was negative, which it was.
My partner was honest with me, “Honey, you look terrible,” she said in her lilting southern drawl, “you’re siiiick.”
I protested. “Maybe I could…”
“Laura,” she said, “You’re sick and it’s okay. Just let your workmates know and it will be okay.”
It was okay. I am one cog in a wheel with many spokes and I wasn’t needed. It was easy to replace me and continue with business as usual.
So now it was just me and my sick self. I wrote to my doctor sharing my symptoms in the hope that she’d tell me I had _______ and that I should take ______ but her medical assistant sent me back a long email about rest, fluids, and flushing my sinuses with a Neti pot. There was no easy button for this one.
The first day I watched TV and slept. I felt wrecked. The second day was the same and then the third. My friend texted to ask if I was going to the neighborhood clothing swap, my favorite event of the year. When I told her I was sick, she texted back, “No way! You never get sick!”
“Right?!” I rhetorically shouted to the sickness gods. They had stricken the wrong person. This had to be some kind of a mix-up. I don’t get sick. That’s been my line for most of my adult life. But there was no denying that my body, this vessel housing me, was a sniffling, coughing, aching, feverish mess. I canceled meeting after meeting and slowly relinquished myself to the reality that I couldn’t wrangle my symptoms into remission. I’d have to rest my way to recovery.
To protect her from infection, I isolated from my partner, spending most of my time in the basement, occasionally coming up for a snack or a visit. “I feel like such a loser,” I told her.
“You got problems,” she replied lovingly-jokingly-half-serious. “You didn’t do anything to get sick. You just got sick like everyone does and now you have to give yourself time to recover.”
I knew what she was saying was true, but I couldn’t get past the inner voice that whispered there was something wrong with me, that by succumbing to sickness I had somehow failed. In my sick state, I couldn’t do the things I normally did and that made me feel like I wasn’t pulling my weight as a human.
On my fourth full day of being sick, my partner went out for the day leaving me fully alone. In this state of not just being sick and isolated, but being fully alone, knocking around our big house by myself, I spent time contemplating why it was so hard for me to be sick. Why did I feel like a loser? I didn’t think of my partner or my daughter or my friends as losers when they got sick. So why did I assign this label to myself?
I was feeling like a failure because I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t being productive in any way, shape or form. And, I was inconveniencing others — slowing down projects, rearranging schedules. In my inability to accomplish tasks, I felt like I was not measuring up.
I’m not proud to admit that I felt this way because it feels very un-evolved, a belief my hard-scrabble Danish great-grandmother might espouse. I fancy myself as more enlightened and was disappointed in myself for being so hard on myself. For twenty years I taught yoga. I would tell students to simply be, “You’re a human being,” I’d tell them as they lay in Savasana, “not a human doing.”
Yesterday my little sister texted me and asked how I was doing. I wasn’t doing great. Most of my symptoms were still there and now I had an upset stomach on top of the other stuff. “Mostly the same,” I texted back, “but I’ve added diarrhea to the mix [add winky-face emoji].”
But before she could reply I quickly texted, “But I’m planning to be better by tomorrow.” She shot back a smiley face emoji. I returned to my tenth hour of TV. I was tired of being sick and part of me wanted to believe that I would be better by today, but I was also resigned to waking up still feeling ill.
I went to bed at 8 p.m. and slept mostly well until a coughing fit woke me at 3 a.m. “Maybe I’m not getting better,” I wallowed to myself as I took a shot of nighttime cough suppressant. The coughing fit, like the diarrhea the day before came as a messenger to remind me that my plans, no matter how clear and firm, were not in charge of this cold.
Today is day five. I’m writing this in the evening and I feel much better. I still have a cough. I still blow my nose a lot. I’m still tired. But I feel better. I feel like I could probably go to work tomorrow. But I’m not going to. I’ve learned that I can’t force my way to wellness. This morning, even though I felt pretty good, I canceled all of my meetings and committed to another day at home. Just one more day, I think.
I’ve thought many times over these past few days about people in my life with much more extreme illnesses, chronic and life-threatening illnesses. I feel ashamed of myself for struggling so much with this silly cold. I think about my dad who battled cancer for years and had to relinquish control over aspects of his life, more and more until he died. Even when he stopped being a therapist, stopped coaching baseball, stopped painting his fabulous paintings, stopped taking us for doughnuts, he was still Dad. I loved him just the same.
Physically, I haven’t enjoyed being this sick, but in the end it’s just a bad cold. And I’m getting better. And I’ve reminded myself of an important lesson that I needed to be reminded of. I’m a human being, not a human doing. And even if I can’t do all the things I do when I’m feeling 100%, I’m still me. And that’s enough.