I. For the second time in my life, I have handed over to a lab samples of my blood, urine, and yes, stool.
I returned home last weekend from far away, and it would seem that I did so with something in my small intestine. Not large intestine, mind you — not Maria, Full of Grace — but rather, something evil of a viral, bacterial, or parasitic origin. You don't need the details, but the upshot has not been anything approaching fun.
II. When we're sick, we tend to pine for chicken soup, and the creature comforts of our youth (The Rockford Files, cereal for dinner, say), when a day of missed classes was an adventure and the house ours for the taking. We allow self-indulgence, wallow a bit, try to catch up on sleep.
And then maybe we become worse off. A bad flu, say. We forego basic hygiene, don't check email, and begin to develop a vague sense of wanting our mom, though you know there's no adult equivalent of the comfort mom could provide when you were sick as a child, and you believed her when she said everything would be OK — because then it soon was.
But being really sick (malaria, Dengue fever, etc.) scares the crap out of you. It makes you feel helpless, and transports your emotional core back to past experiences of utter misery, childhood high-fever nightmares, and physical pain. For me, it means June 1990, and my summer of salmonella.
III. Any time food poisoning or local toddler-spread norovirus sets in for more than a day or two, I'm holed up again, alone in a dingy one-star hotel in the garment district of Paris. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches (days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like salmonella and far more like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. In many ways, it was the most frightening and defining period of my life.
IV. And so I sit in the hopefully brief misery of now, keeping my distance from the kids, while eating their applesauce and toast — my sick somewhere between worse off and salmonella — and starting to finally write a 20-year-old story, while in a petri dish of a Quest Diagnostics lab somewhere, my shit begins to tell this one.
Comments