Waiting for rebalance ...

This flu seems to offer a trap. Every time I try to push back into ordinary activity, my body temperature goes haywire and I feel weak and tired. Since pushing myself is, for me, the stuff of life, this is disconcerting.

I understand this will pass, but in the meantime, I'm sick of being sick!***When I posted the foregoing, how was I to know that I would encounter an article in the Times which perfectly catches why I find waiting out this illness so frustrating. The American author had surgery in Germany where medical practice assumes that knocking out a healthy post-operative patient with pain meds is unnecessary. She was mystified.

What exactly is resting?

I know how to sleep but resting is an in-between space I do not inhabit. It’s like an ambiguous place that can be reached only by walking into a magic closet and emerging on the other side to find a dense forest and a talking lion, a lion who can guide me toward the owl who supplies the forest with pain pills.

... I took two ibuprofens that first day. In hindsight, I didn’t need them, but I felt like I should take something. What I really needed was patience pills, and a few distractions. The hardest part of my recovery was lingering in bed, or on the sofa, feeling the discomfort and boredom as time ticked by slowly. I didn’t feel like reading or doing much of anything. ...

I get it.