This last week, I spent a bit of time keeping up my title as a professional sick person. I achieved this, luckily, without having to be in any serious danger, because the cause of my temporary disposition was the series of vaccines I received. I tend to be especially prone to the minor side effects of vaccination- the symptoms that make one feel vaguely under the weather without making one feel seriously at risk of death -which isn’t surprising given my immune pathology.
Enduring a couple of days at most of foggy-headedness, low grade fevers and chills, and frustrating but bearable aches is, if still unpleasant, then at least better than most any other illness I have dealt with in the last decade.
What struck me was when I was told, contrary to my own experience and subsequent expectations, that a couple of days would be in itself an average amount of time for a “normal” person to recover fully from an ordinary illness. That, for someone who has a healthy and attenuated immune system, it is entirely possible to get through the whole cycle of infection for a garden variety cold in a weekend.
This is rather shocking news to me. I had always assumed that when the protagonist of some television show called in sick for a single day, and returned to work/school the next, that this was just one of those idiosyncrasies of the TV universe, the same way characters always wear designer brands and are perfectly made up.
I had always assumed that in reality, of course people who caught a cold would take at least a week to recover, since it usually takes me closer to two, assuming it doesn’t develop into some more severe infection. Of course people who have the flu spend between three and five weeks at home (still optimistic, if you’re asking me), that is, if they can get by without having to be hospitalized.
This probably shouldn’t surprise me. I know, consciously, that I spend more time confined to quarantine by illness than almost anyone I know, and certainly than anyone I’m friends with for reasons other than sharing a medical diagnosis or hospital ward with. Still, it’s easy to forget this. It’s extremely easy to assume, as I find myself often doing even without thinking, that barring obvious differences, other people are fundamentally not unlike myself, and share most of my perspectives, values, and challenges. Even when I am able to avoid doing this consciously, I find that my unconscious mind often does this for me.
It’s jarring to be suddenly reminded, then, of exactly how much my health truly does, and I don’t use this phrase lightly, screw me over; apparently it does so so often and so thoroughly that I have to a large degree ceased to notice, except when it causes a jarring contrast against my peers.
Feeling slightly terrible as a side effect of getting vaccines has, on an intellectual and intuitive level, ceased to be an annoyance in itself. It is only problematic insofar as it prevents me from going about my business otherwise: my mental fog makes writing difficult, my fevers and chills compel me to swaddle my shivering body to offset its failure to maintain temperature, and my omnipresent myalgia gives me a constant nagging reminder of the frailty of my mortal coil, but these are mere physical inconveniences. Of course, this does not negate the direct physical impact of my current disposition; it merely contextualizes it.
Having long ago grown used to the mental feeling of illness, and without feeling poor enough physically to garner any genuine concern for serious danger to my long term health and survival, the fact that I am sick rather than well is reduced to a mere footnote: a status. In the day to day story that I narrate to myself and others, the symptoms I have described are mere observations of the setting, without any lasting impact on the plot, nor on the essence of the story itself.
I often call myself a professional sick person; a phrase which I learnt from John Green via Hazel Grace Lancaster. The more time I spend thinking about my health, the more I find this metaphor apt. After all, in the past decade of being enrolled in and nominally attending public school, I have spent more time in hospitals than in a classroom. My health occupies a majority of my time, and the consequences for ignoring it are both immediate and dire. I regard my health as a fundamental part of my routine and identity, the way most do their jobs. Perhaps most compelling: my focus on it, like that of a professional on their trade, has warped my perspective.
We all know of the story of the IT expert incapable of explaining in human terms, or of the engineer so preoccupied with interesting solutions as to be blind to the obvious ones, or of the artist unable to accept a design that is less than perfect. In my case it is that I have spent so much time dealing with my own medical situation that it is exceedingly difficult to understand the relative simplicity of others’.