Sunday, January 28, 2018

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.

3 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

From what I am reading, this is no flu to take lightly. It is suprisingly deadly where it used to see you died from flu only if you get pneumonia. This one, like the one from 1918-19 kills fast and especially hits a certain age group. Scary stuff.

Civic Center said...

You put your finger on it with, "Since pushing myself is, for me, the stuff of life, this is disconcerting." For the duration of whatever this is, you have to do the opposite. Be extremely gentle with yourself and do nothing but sleep for as long as is required. The body knows how to heal itself but sometimes you just have to let it do its thing with nothing more than feverish, languorous sleep and chicken soup.

Brandon said...

Seconding what Rain and Michael say. And San Francisco has many places for chicken soup. (We'd have chicken soup, too, or saimin or tea rice.)