Sickness as reminder
I know April showers bring May flowers . . . but March showers? No happy little rhyme to go with that one! I know, I know we need rain, I’m extremely happy for that part. But I’m simply a little ready for the kind of rain that’s warm enough that you can run outside barefoot in it. No, I don’t do that a lot, but I’d like to know I could if I really wanted to without risking frostbite! I somehow added or “liked” a meteorological thing on FB where I now get daily warnings and I-70 closings from western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. I sorta like it and hate it at the same time. I put it on there for when I was driving out to Great Bend for the state basketball tournament games, and so far can’t bring myself to take it off, or “unlike” it or however you make it disappear. Call it morbid fascination I suppose, but I get all the blizzard pictures and wind warnings with max gust predictions. It’s either misguided nostalgia or grateful we’re only getting the rain part when it reaches here.
My chapter of life is also currently affected by the stupidly resistant to go away stomach bug that hit a week ago yesterday. It crept up on me as I worked that day thinking I was simply tired from the weekend and that’s why I felt a little “funny”. That descriptor didn’t last past 7 p.m. that evening. Toward the end of the week a final ok-I-give-up communication with my doc via the tech. portal turned things around. He responded in a quite timely fashion and by about 36 hrs later I remembered what it was like to feel hope in getting to experience another day which happened to be Sunday. I don’t have a real feel for how the sermon went, but I was thrilled that I survived without any of us seeing any repeat food in an unfortunate incident. TMI?!!! Just keeping it real.
I was convinced 3 out of those icky 5 days that I had the covids, because there are no other sicknesses possible since March 12, 2020. Took enough covid tests that I’m lucky I didn’t die of a nosebleed. When they kept coming back negative, I decided I probably wasn’t putting the stick up far enough in my nose. When it popped out the corner of my eye the last time, I figured I’d done enough. O.k., not really, but I think it might have been close! I just wanted to diagnose early because Queen Latifah’s voice is now telling us there is a medicine that will stand up to the covids if you take it early enough after you discover you’re positive. I didn’t have the covids, but I still appreciate Queen Latifah’s soothing voice, something quite confidence-producing, after all she IS the Equalizer . . .
Feeling lousy for a week has raised the level of tenderheartedness I have for those who have more chronic illnesses. Most of us are people of compassion and care, and sometimes the busy-ness of life makes us overlook or forget how hard it is to deal with illness on a daily basis long-term. Having a bright and generous spirit is a million times harder when our bodies simply don’t want to respond to getting up, showering, trying to get even the smallest tasks done. So where I have been cavalier in my own sense of “toughness”, where I have been short-sighted in how difficult it is to access care without technology at your fingertips, where I have been ignorant of the exhaustion and weariness of those who don’t have the luxury to miss work without the risk of losing their job, I apologize. I recommit myself to putting priorities on recognition and both prayers and concrete help where I and we can for those who struggle to both access good healthcare and the prescriptions that getting better often requires. I want desperately not to be a person that only becomes sensitive to the hurts of others when it rocks my own world, but alas and alack, I resemble that remark no small amount of the time.
I am grateful for a return to health and a regaining of strength. I am humbly grateful for a job that has affordable health insurance with access to good healthcare. And while we can all throw rocks at the version of national health insurance access we have in this country and it does not serve everyone in need equally well, I will continue to do as much due diligence as I can to work for and vote my conscious for everyone in every circumstance to have access to quality medical care to feel as healthy as possible from every illness.
To reassure you that even when ill, my way of being in life is consistent, on the worst day when I wondered if I would ever feel good again, I broke into a rather loud and dramatic acapella version of “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus . . .” Imagine it sung with deep emotion and two days of bed-head. The music and costuming would not have won an award, but the volume and intensity might have reached the threshold of greatness! Not sure it made me feel better, but my cats and the dog left me alone for awhile after that. Come to think of it, so did the neighbors . . .