In Which the Author Contemplates Mortality

I’m sick. And like most of you can probably guess about someone with my personality, I find this whole thing to be really annoying. Frankly, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to overcome some microscopic little bugs.

Of course, in this case it isn’t bugs (i.e. bacteria). I have discovered this through a very scientific method. I have ingested a particularly vigorous antibiotic for the past five days and no change. Ergo, it’s a virus.

I hate viruses. Viruses, to me are the epitome of “the uncanny” as defined by Freud:

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’

As far as I’m concerned, if I can’t tell whether or not something is a living organism, I don’t want it anywhere near me. Viruses and ventriloquist dummies, that means you.

Because viruses are not “alive,” they cannot be “killed.” (no lectures on the veracity of my biology here, this is a rant, and besides, I was a Geology and Literature major). So what they do, the bastards, is proceed to take up unwelcome residence in your body, trash the place until they get tired, then politely (ha!) retire to some quiet corner of your system where they remain for the rest of your natural life. Like squatters who have found some loophole in the law, they just set up house and stay forever! Don’t talk to me about the good these inactive, inhospitable guests do, how they lend you antibodies to fight off other invaders. Those are the castrated ones, the vaccines, the flu shots. This one is making me feel like crapola, and there’s not a thing I can do, and after his reign of terror is concluded, he thinks he can just sit idly by forever and laugh at this week of pain he put me through, and I’m just going to take it because now he’s made me “immune” to the next silly cold that comes down the pike?

Fuck him!

Anyway, so I was feeling worse and worse all week, and beginning to suspect that I was not, in fact, suffering from strep throat, as I’d suspected. SO yesterday, I took off work and went tot he doctor, who took some blood and decided to do a mono test. Let me repeat that for those of you in the back. Mono. Test.

“But I can’t afford to have mono!” I explained in what I hoped sounded at least a moderately reasonable tone. “I’m a novelist and my first book is due in two months and I really need to be well to finish it.”

This hot young doctor in her bright pink sweater and white miniskirt gave me a look and said, “Who can afford to have mono?” Okay, touche, but I really, really, really can’t be sick right now.

The test isn’t back yet, but right now, she says I’ve got a virus. No shitzu, Sherlock. And that it could last ten days. Ten. Days. Ten days of hacking up mucus, of feeling like my head weighs fifty pounds, of not hearing well, or breathing well, or staying up past seven-thirty or being able to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes at a time… ugh. I hate being sick!

Curse you, Virus! I hope you get some really crappy apartments in my lymph nodes. Like, some really, really cruddy ones left over from chicken pox or something. And whatever you might be telling yourself, you are NOT welcome here. Hmph.