I am so over this being sick shit that I can’t begin to tell you how over it I am. I sit shivering; wrapped in blankets and sipping tea. I’m hunched over the cold screen of my eReader seeking warmth in other people’s witty words and clever turns of phrases. Warmth I do not find. I look outside at the balmy spring days passing me by and watch the greenhouse sit unfinished, the beehives yet un-abuzz, the weeds growing where I should be planting. On top of that, there’s a blog to write.

It’s so bad that I can barely muster the strength to whine about my sorry lot in life.

But “barely” does not mean “can’t”.

I’m really lucky that I don’t get sick more than once a year. I make a bad patient. All I want is to be left alone with a six-pack of ginger ale, a couple of gallons of Gatorade, Campbell’s chicken soup, and poached eggs. I’ll be miserable for a week and then I’ll be fine. I’m not sure where the poached eggs come in but all I remember from being sick as a kid is that poached eggs were about the first thing I could eat afterwards. I must have some association equating them to recovery. Sort of comfort food without the caloric penalty.

All this time being unable to physically move more than twenty feet without gasping for air has not prevented me from thinking, and my thoughts this week have all revolved around me being sick.

Poor me. Poor me.

Okay, it’s really not that bad. It’s actually kind of interesting to watch how the whole process changes over time and to see how totally in denial I can be about what’s coming next even though I’ve been through this many times before.

The first phase of my illness is this kind of under-the-weather feeling; a sensation that, even though I’m okay, something isn’t quite right. This is easy to dismiss because it happens almost any time a virus tries to establish a foothold and my immune system steps things up a notch to repel the invader. Typically the feeling comes and quickly goes away, but, when it’s something more serious then I will begin to lose my senses. In a very specific order.

First thing to go is my sense of sweet. This is a big deal for someone whose middle name is Twinkie and who’s been known to microwave year-old Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls in attempt to duplicate their original factory-freshness. Chocolate, ice cream, cookies, all of it; ends up tasting like chalk. When my illness struck last Wednesday, there were two Red Velvet Cookies left out of a twelve-pack; a count that remains unchanged a week later. If you’ve never had a Red Velvet Cookie, imagine a Red Velvet cupcake with the same amount of icing and a tenth the amount of cake. Writing this now makes it sound like chalk.

The second sense to vanish is my sense of, er…, um…, well, you know: that.When this step is reached I know I am well and truly screwed. As it were.

The rest of the senses – smell, feeling, sound – then tumble in rapid domino-like progression until all that’s left is ginger ale, Gatorade, chicken soup, and poached eggs. All blanket-wrapped in a whiny little bundle.

On Day Three, I start to really feel bad; but I’m not yet really sick. It hasn’t permeated my psyche. It hasn’t crushed my spirit.

Days Four and Five are plateau days. I’m used to being sick and, you know, it’s not so bad. So I go out and do some work in the yard – this time I put up half the greenhouse roof – putter around, and delude myself with thoughts like: yeah, I might be getting over this. Day Five starts just a little lower on the feel-good index but I’m still able to be bored. I lay low until boredom sets in and then I go out and work; until exhaustion sets in an hour or two later. I do all this knowing, absolutely knowing, that I’m sick and should be resting. But all my senses are gone so what am I thinking?

And then it’s Day Six.

I wish I could die.

That’s all I can say about Day Six. All day in bed with my body making noises that sound like a thunderstorm in the Grand Canyon; the sounds of my body consuming itself for food. By this point my “unessential” systems have shut down to shunt energy to my immune system which has finally caught on to the whole “Eeek! Evil Microbe!” concept.

And the evil microbe is sent packing.

So, on Day Seven I feel like I might just live but it’s time to do a cold-start on a couple of critical systems.

When you see the average human walking down the street, in terms of cell counts, only ten-percent of what you see is human; the other ninety percent is bacteria; bacteria that live inside us and make possible little things like digestion, nutrient absorption, and other things critical to life. We are basically life-support bags for microbes. These bacteria expect little from us beyond a warm, moist place to live and a bit of food. When we get sick we: 1) stop eating and 2) get really hot to help drive out the viruses. Neither of these things is good for our coevolved bacteria but both are really bad and our microbial overlords die in their countless billions, effectively shutting down our digestive tract.

Day Seven: How to repopulating an intestinal flora based nutrient extraction system. All I will say is: yogurt helps. I will leave it to your own imaginations as to why that is so.

It’s now Day Eight. I’m on the mend but still a bit tired and hungry. I can still tell I’m sick because all of my senses haven’t returned. No, not that. I mean I haven’t eaten the Red Velvet Cookies yet. But pizza doesn’t sound like it would be a tragic mistake anymore.

That’s most of what happens to me when I get sick. I’m sure each of you has a slightly different experience and different methods to cope. We describe these things as having “a cold” or “a touch of the flu” but they’re much more important than that. These paths our illnesses follow, the gauntlets we run when we get a cold or flu, are dances. They are single shots in a battle that has been ongoing for billions of years; ever since the first time one life form decided to infect another. And lost. More importantly, at least in my skewed view of things, what these little battles are, is practice.

I don’t believe that any of you would agree with the following statement: “The best way to train to run a marathon is to watch Jeopardy reruns on TV.” Okay, well maybe one of you. Most of you would imagine that there would be some hard work and actual running involved. Which is how I look at being sick.

The keen sighted among you will have noted that not so much as an aspirin was mentioned in the apparently absent pharmacopeia with which I battled my illness. There is no way to fight a flu virus (yeah, there is some indication that zinc compounds might help but not much). You can suppress symptoms – fever, aches, pains, sniffles, etc. – but when you do that you’re taking away the tools your body has developed over those billions of years of evolution. Sort of like training to run that marathon and then, on the day of the race, tying a rope around your ankles. 

You are the evolutionary end-result of a straight line of survivors going all the way back to that first successful bug. Those survivors figured out: Hmmm… If I do this on Day Five, I get well a bit faster. It gives me a killer headache, but I get over it faster. I know they didn’t really think this, it was a statistical determination, but all those creatures with alternate strategies aren’t around to talk about them. What we see as symptoms to be suppressed are the things we feel as our bodies are making us well. Why would you want to suppress that?

My take on the flu vaccine runs along similar lines. First, a flu shot is needed every year because the influenza virus mutates constantly. Second, the pool of viral genetics available is multi-species. That is, flu infects more than just us so a human flu outbreak can come from a number of different places in the wild and in the barnyard. Third, because of the first two bullet-points, the people who develop the virus are just guessing what kind of virus to vaccinate against.

And for this they want twenty bucks.

Finally, all the really deadly outbreaks of the flu have occurred when a completely unknown version of the virus appeared. Getting the vaccine protects you against something that probably isn’t a real threat to you while at the same time denying your immune system the opportunity for some practice so that it will be ready to protect you against something that really is. So I don’t.

Besides, I don’t like needles.

In going back and rereading this I get the feeling that I might have a tendency to overanalyze things and pontificate somewhat. I’ll write that off to being sick; I’m sure the feeling will pass by next week. But I’m glad I got this out of the way. I’m still feeling a bit under the weather and was unsure if I’d even be able to pound out a blog this week given my bad attitude, aching knuckles, and lack of dessert for a whole week.

Ooh, dessert: I better go check on those cookies.