The Picture of Health

 

My skull hurts.

It’s March 15 in Northern Illinois, it’s nearly 80 outside, and I have the worst case of the flu that I can ever remember having.

I’ve been flat on my back for two days, except when I drag myself into my car, drive the six minutes to the barn, and feed my horses. We only recently moved there, so I don’t have anyone to fill in for me. The elder woman whos property it is is too unsteady on her feet to help, and I don’t think she’d want to even if she could. Sad.

But a beautiful neighbor, 15-year-old Ashley, walked my Elika this afternoon. She’d walked her for three days last summer when I was tied up at a horse fair, talking about Reiki, about Animal Communicatio. I’d wished Elika could come with me, but of course she couldn’t. Ashley was a godsend. A lovely girl, home schooled, who smashed all of my bigoted perceptions about the home-schooled. It’s good to be reminded that we can be wrong. I relish that.

Today is Thursday. This bug hit me on Monday night. I was working on my taxes, getting the numbers together so I could hand them off to my accountant, and I felt a tickle in my chest. Uh-oh, I thought. What the heck is that?

By morning, I knew. I was drenched in sweat, every muscle in my body ached, and I had a wracking cough. On the front page of the Chicago Tribune, a story warned of a nasty flu bug that had hit the area: fever, chills, muscle spasms (muscle spasms?), wracking cough. They said it could last up to a week.

I never pay attention to stories like that, with their drama. I figured I’d be fine in a day or two. I was a perplexed that I’d even gotten sick to begin with, though. I rarely get sick. And when I do, when I feel something coming on, like a tickle in the chest, I go to bed and sleep it off. Not this time.

Then I remembered. Two years ago, as the result of an accident with one of my horses, a freak accident—it absolutely was not his fault—I ended up with five broken ribs and a fractured spleen. The ribs healed. The spleen had to go.

The surgeon assured me that adults don’t need their spleens. He was a nice guy, and he’d saved my life (if my spleen had ruptured, I could have bled to death in a matter of minutes), but I wasn’t buying this. I didn’t imagine  that the Divine just inserted extra body parts into us for the heck of it. Then he said that if I ever got a sore throat, I should immediately go to the doctor for a throat culture because when you didn’t have a spleen, sore throats could quickly turn into Strep.

This didn’t make sense to me either. What was so special about sore throats? You either needed your spleen or you didn’t. And how could a simple sore throat turn into Strep? Wasn’t that a specific bacteria? I may not have heard him correctly, of course. I was drugged to the nines after begin sliced open—30 staples—and I already told you about the broken ribs.

The acupuncturist I went to for help reducing the swelling in my optic nerves (my head hit a wall hard enough to knock me out; I hadn’t been wearing a helmet because I wasn’t riding) told me the spleen is part of the immune system.

So yesterday, lying in sweat—and yes, I got those muscle spasms; as I lay on the couch, my legs were jumping four or five inches in the air; I kid you not—not even able to open the window and get a cool March breeze because we’ve messed up the weather so much it’s July in March, I figured that, while I’d been able to continue fighting off infections even after I’d lost my spleen, when exposed to a super bug, I didn’t really have a fighting chance.

I’d gotten sick in December, too, upper respiratory. I thought it was due to stress, and breathing a huge amount of sand dust in a cruddy riding arena. But now I realized that I’d been exposed to hacking, sneezing, nose-blowing people both in December and for the past couple of weeks. What had happened? I’d joined a church!  A church!

So what’s the moral of this story? I’m too sick to know for sure. Here are a couple:

Please, when you’re sick, STAY HOME. Don’t spread your viruses around, some of us have compromised immune systems, and even if we didn’t for heaven’s sake use some common sense.

And when you’re well, give thanks, every single day for your good health.

 

 I hope you will be moved to share your thoughts.

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