Lovely Time to be Unwell
I am so impressed by the timing of this illness. Could NOT have picked a better time to get ill. Grades are in, all the paperwork due on a deadline is in. Not going in to work today -- staying home in bed (except for right this very exact minute, during which you may imagine me wanly and dramatically typing in my Blogger window), and reading. Delicious.
Nobody needs me, thank God. I'm free to be as ill as I like, and rest as much as I like. Sam made me tea. Also he brings the thermometer up and brings me medicines. He is a darling man, and the angels sing when he gets up in the morning.
I spend a great deal of my life being aware that I'm not living in the middle ages -- work hazard, I guess -- and never so much as when I'm ill. I like to lie in bed with my little fever* and think about how much more uncomfortable I'd be if it were the middle ages. No tea, for one thing. Tisanes, yes, but none of that nice caffeined business from China and India. (I never imagine myself, in these meditations, to be Of The Nobility -- nah, where's the fun in that? I like to imagine Life As a Peasant. Much more cheering.) No electric blanket. No central heating. None of this great day-time cold medicine of which I am so fond.
I had a GREAT time when I was having the child. Healthy mom, healthy child, no problems in the pregnancy -- and he didn't fit. (I mean this quite literally -- we're talking a 10 lb. 8 oz baby here.) We should both have been dead, but we weren't! Ha! Cause we weren't living in the middle ages! As they wheeled me in for the emergency C-section, I told the nurses, cheerfully, I might add, "If this were the Middle Ages I'd be dead now!" Marvelous. Snatched out of the jaws of death by sheer accident of timing.
As far as I'm concerned, this business about living in a developed country in the 21st century is something that I should never, for one moment, forget about. Absolute luck. Not my doing. Necessary to be grateful.
Going to go back to bed now, and read some more Ciaran Carson -- and maybe some Edith Stein --and convalesce. And then tomorrow, when I'm up and about, I'll buy somebody in Somalia a beehive.
*As for this fever business -- I completely forgot -- due to having the fever -- that my normal body temperature is about 96 degrees, so if the thermometer reads 99, I DO have a fever! Ha! So there! This would explain why I felt like I had a fever but the thermometer wouldn't cooperate.
Nobody needs me, thank God. I'm free to be as ill as I like, and rest as much as I like. Sam made me tea. Also he brings the thermometer up and brings me medicines. He is a darling man, and the angels sing when he gets up in the morning.
I spend a great deal of my life being aware that I'm not living in the middle ages -- work hazard, I guess -- and never so much as when I'm ill. I like to lie in bed with my little fever* and think about how much more uncomfortable I'd be if it were the middle ages. No tea, for one thing. Tisanes, yes, but none of that nice caffeined business from China and India. (I never imagine myself, in these meditations, to be Of The Nobility -- nah, where's the fun in that? I like to imagine Life As a Peasant. Much more cheering.) No electric blanket. No central heating. None of this great day-time cold medicine of which I am so fond.
I had a GREAT time when I was having the child. Healthy mom, healthy child, no problems in the pregnancy -- and he didn't fit. (I mean this quite literally -- we're talking a 10 lb. 8 oz baby here.) We should both have been dead, but we weren't! Ha! Cause we weren't living in the middle ages! As they wheeled me in for the emergency C-section, I told the nurses, cheerfully, I might add, "If this were the Middle Ages I'd be dead now!" Marvelous. Snatched out of the jaws of death by sheer accident of timing.
As far as I'm concerned, this business about living in a developed country in the 21st century is something that I should never, for one moment, forget about. Absolute luck. Not my doing. Necessary to be grateful.
Going to go back to bed now, and read some more Ciaran Carson -- and maybe some Edith Stein --and convalesce. And then tomorrow, when I'm up and about, I'll buy somebody in Somalia a beehive.
*As for this fever business -- I completely forgot -- due to having the fever -- that my normal body temperature is about 96 degrees, so if the thermometer reads 99, I DO have a fever! Ha! So there! This would explain why I felt like I had a fever but the thermometer wouldn't cooperate.
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