say "ah" 



How is it that I can have a husband who travels all over the world to strange countries, and I can have two children who attend a preschool with the germs of 32 other snot-nosed children....and *I* am the only one who comes down with Strep Throat? I've been out of commission for the last two days.

Is there no justice in this world? I wash my hands constantly. I eat my veggies. I exercise regularly. I'm a Mom. Moms don't get sick.

I don't sleep much, though. That might be the weak link in my armor.

Strep Throat sucks. Any sickness in which you can't eat is no friend of mine. It hurt so much to swallow that it wasn't worth the bother.

I'm not a good sick person. I have some mental disfunction in which I must always be busy. I'm sure it's not heathy or good for me. But it is what it is. I don't do "rest." And I have a fairly high tolerance for discomfort so I don't think I'm sick until I'm really, really, really sick. By the time I got to the doctor, I told him "I'm fine. I just have a cold." and he answered "You're not fine. Your fever is 102.7 and you have strep throat." Whoops.

I tried to watch daytime TV. Really I tried. But it just made me crazy. First, the whole Pope thing. For some reason, I expected intelligent, reverent coverage of the naming of the new Pope. I'm not Catholic and don't really understand the whole thing, but it seemed like a significant enough event to me.

But the announcers...oh my god, the announcers. It was like they were on the Daily Show or on SNL. They were a complete parody of themselves. I must have listened a good 25 minutes of them trying to determine whether the smoke was "white, gray, black, grayish, whitish or grayish-white." Couldn't they have just kept quiet and waited? It seemed like a good time to be reflective and silent to me.

I knew I was in trouble when one of the networks went to George Stepanopolis for his opinion. Did I miss something or is he now a religious scholar? I was expecting Geraldo Riveria to show up any minute there...

So I gave up on TV and read two books. Books which required no thought. One was "The Devil Wears Prada" and was surprisingly clever. Two thumbs up for a reading day when your throat is on fire or for a sunny beach day.

I don't remember the name of the other one, which is never a good sign.

At least it wasn't Mono. That's what the doctor originally said he thought I had. And he told me with a cruel, gleeful look in his eye, "The only cure for Mono is a month of complete rest." For normal people, that might sounds like heaven, I'm sure. For me, that's my personal idea of hell: No marathon training. No bicycling trip to France. No chasing after the kids. No soccer practices. No long afternoons at the park.

i couldn't do it.
 

Posted: Wed - April 20, 2005 at 06:28 PM          

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