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- That sadistic six-fingered man in The Princess Bride says that if you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything, and it's true. (Lots of things are true. It's true that it's the little things in life, it's true that you can't choose your family but you can choose your friends, it's true that blood is thicker than water.) You might think, well shit, I'd never do this, or I'd never do that, or I'll always think this or that. But if you get sick that all changes, and if you're really sick you lose room in your brain to think about other things. It's sad, and at first you know it's sad, but eventually the sickness takes over that and you don't care anymore. It's not that you don't care, it's that you don't have room in your brain to care. We're all fighting against death, but at some point you even stop caring about that. When you're healthy you're capable of the entire world. When you're not healthy you realize that you're only capable of drawing air into and out of your body (if you're lucky enough to even be capable of that). I think I lost about 4 weeks of this spring when I was sick, weeks that just ran by without my noticing. At first, in March, I was still trying to live a normal life with normal interactions with people, I was still fighting. But after a few weeks of that, after I realized and accepted that it wasn't a short-term illness and that I wasn't going to be better by the next weekend or the weekend after that, I stopped fighting - I accepted it, or I gave in to it, or I gave up (whichever), and each day became all and only about that day - how many times I had coughed, how much my ribs hurt, whether I'd gotten a nap or not. I wasn't capable of connecting the days and I wasn't capable of taking care of anything or anyone. I was hardly capable of taking care of myself. Things went by unnoticed and neglected. Relationships suffered and I hardly noticed - and if I did notice, I didn't have the energy to do anything about it. It's scary to me to think that I will get sick like that again. But I will, if I'm lucky (if I don't get hit by a bus tomorrow). What I learned is, you can't do it alone. No, what I really mean is, I learned that I can't do it alone. My dental hygienist told me, quite sternly, that if I ever need anything I should call her - and she meant it, and if I ever do need anything, I will call her. Hopefully I will have already asked the people I'm actually close to, though. I'm pretty lucky to have gotten sick like I did this year - lucky to have learned the lessons I learned from it, and lucky to have not gotten sicker, because there are plenty of things worse than pertussis and some broken ribs.
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