Well, this is a riveting topic!
Ha ha. Just a little muse, a wee rant perhaps, on how getting sick has farther-reaching impacts than we might suppose.
One of my most stressful experiences was waking the kids on a school morning and realizing one or the other was ill. First, I was concerned for them – did they have a fever? Do we need medicine? And the panic of realizing I still needed to get myself ready and go to work, or was it bad enough I should try and get a sub?! Could my mom maybe watch him or her, and how would I have time to get us all ready and to her place and then to school?
My mind would be racing with the plans for the day, last minute photocopying that was needed, reminders that I must write on the white board. Was I on for staff devotions this week? GAhh!! Back when I taught in White Rock, I had almost an hour commute to deal with as well. Who do you call at 6 am?
Clothes, breakfast, lunches, shoes, jackets, backpacks. Hair and makeup. What to wear. Car seats, crying children, spilt coffee. Leather bag still full of marking I didn’t get done last night, because it was midnight and sleep took over.
In the car, off to mom’s, thankful she was there for me. Or a few frantic calls to someone who might be able to sub for me on short notice, then a scramble to write up and email plans for the day, largely from memory as everything was usually at the school. Or if it wasn’t at school, and in fact in a bin under my desk at home, how on earth was I going to organize that lesson? I couldn’t afford to miss a teaching day with diploma exams looming. Oh, the stress.
This past year I missed a planned trip to see my best friend and my daughter. I never did get to see my daughter at her job, though I had pictured appearing to surprise her there so many times. I got sick just before the trip, and everything fell apart. Of course there must be another time, right? No, that rare alignment of schedules never appeared again.
Missed opportunities for travel, jobs, or visits happen to everyone. And I’m guessing my reader might be thinking, “What’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that getting sick can totally change someone’s trajectory. Maybe things were just taking off at a job, and then a week of illness meant they were demoted back to the bottom. Perhaps a trip of a lifetime never happens because sickness struck at the wrong time. A student misses most of a course or exam week, throwing awry their education, goals, finances, and opportunities. There is a famous story of young copy boy Truman Capote, who left a reading of Robert Frost early because he felt unwell. Frost was so offended he asked that Capote be fired from The New Yorker, ending Capote’s dream of being published there. Eventually, Truman became a celebrated author anyway, so all’s well that ends well, I suppose.
Are we getting sick longer these days? Or am I just getting older and weaker? It does seem like the severity of something that used to be a few days with a cold has increased. I am still coughing hard, wracking coughs right now, in the third week of whatever-this-is.
So, what’s my problem? Getting sick is simply an inevitable part of life, isn’t it?
No. Not always. As a teacher in classrooms for many years, I saw sick kids sneezing, coughing, throwing up, even feverish almost daily. And why? Because the parents either didn’t notice, didn’t want to notice, or pretended it wasn’t happening. They had work, they had plans, or just couldn’t deal with having little junior at home one more day. Some honestly didn’t know their child was ill. And so off to school they went, to spread their bug to everyone on the bus, in the assembly line, in the classroom, on the playground equipment. Or in the office, where staff are passing by.
And not only kids, of course, but adults. We go to work because we must, or can’t afford not to, sneezing a virus all over the steering wheel of the work truck or the boardroom or the bathroom because life has to go on. It’s not “tough” to go to work sick; it’s stupid and irresponsible. We have no idea the ripple effect that decision will have.
Modern society is stuck on a mind-numbing, terrifically fast assembly line, a sort-of death march to progress. We all have to keep up the pace, early mornings, weekdays, paychecks. Supper, chores, bed, alarm, do-it-all-over-again. There is no finish line, there’s just the next day, the next job, the next year. We can’t relent, because there’s always another rat in the chute ready to take our place if we fall down. It starts with grade school where we reward kids for being on time, for being there every day, even if nothing important is happening. Kids have more and more extra-curricular added as they grow up, with lessons and sports and clubs, reinforcing this idea that if we keep up the frantic pace, somehow we must be getting somewhere. “It will pay off, someday!!” we tell ourselves as we grow more and more weary, stressed, and disillusioned. God forbid we notice life that is being lived TODAY. It’s all for some far-off time, a finish line in the misty twilight years that we will cross in triumph. But the finish line never appears.
Sending kids to school or daycare or a friend’s house when they’re contagious is a symptom of the larger problem; we cannot pause. It would be a monkey wrench rattling and clanging through the gears of our factory-set life. So instead, we keep our own assembly line huffing-and-puffing and forget about the wrench we have now thrown to the four winds, reckless and careless about where or upon whom it lands.
Personally, I am really done with this attitude. It’s plain selfish and thoughtless to knowingly spread germs or viruses to unsuspecting people. One added “bonus” to having diabetes is being sick means my blood sugar is spiked for the duration. It is just what happens. And most cold medications interfere with diabetes meds, making things exponentially worse. So I can’t physically afford to let this keep happening, but I also can’t lock myself in my room for the rest of my life (or can I?…)
Who Is To Blame is a pointless game we can play forever, tracking an illness all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden. Sometimes, sickness happens. I too have gone to work anyway, feeling awful, hoping I’m not contagious. It often feels like we have no choice. But there is something we can do about it. Tell people, for one. And keep ourselves or our kids home until we are healthy. That important thing you really wanted to do today can wait, and it might mean someone else can show up where they need to be. It might make their day, or even their whole life.
Stories for Humans 