Sick Day

I pretty much knew something was going to hit me by Saturday. I’d suspected it for perhaps a week previously – intermittent sore throats, aggressively runny nose, and that generic, pervasive feeling of something being not quite right. By last night, it was a sure thing that I couldn’t ignore any longer. I’ve caught some virus or another.

I used to be somewhat blaise about colds. I’d catch one, do the expected bitching about how bad I felt at lunchtime, then went back to work and pretty successfully ignore the malaise until the opportunity arose to do some more bitching about it. That would last about a week, when people got tired of my bitching and the cold got tired of it too, departing for more entertaining ports.

My co-workers are still that way about it. I once gave them sympathy (knowing that eventually my turn would come around again to grovel for sympathy myself). Now I just resent that they have brought their little germ-factory selves into my realm of influence. Oh, I smile, and still mouth the right words. “How you feeling today?” “Cold any better?” “Damn. you look beat. You ought to go home early.” But then I go wash my hands and hope that they kept their cooties to themselves.

One of the cooties must have escaped last week, though. There’s been a lot of illness in my department, but not a lot of absenteeism. That’s a bad combination for an immunosuppressed person who tries not to live in a cave nor “Monk out” about being around sick people. I still went to lunch and sat across the table from the Walking Vectors of Death. More fool I.

I don’t handle being sick well any more. I do a lot less griping, and a lot more worrying. It won’t be the liver that kills me now. Hell, my liver has far less milage on it than the rest of me. It’s going to be a side effect of the meds that gets me. I’ll get lymphoma, or melanoma, or go into kidney failure. If that doesn’t happen, then the next big flu epidemic could have my name on it. Or perhaps the bullet will be a common cold. Like the one I have now.

I stayed home from work today. Never used to do that when I was sick. Now, if I want to earn my right to gripe about the brown-nosers who wear their diseases like a badge of honor, I have to stay home and suffer in silence. Except I won’t gripe. I’ll go in tomorrow, over the worst of this rhinovirus, or whatever it is. And I’ll smile, and say I feel much better, thank-you, and wonder to myself who’s a carrier to what new pathogen, and try not to think about whether or not my immune system is up to the next challenge.

This is the stuff they don’t tell you about pre-transplant.