Mondays with Mike: The lost week

A week ago yesterday my Sunday started pretty typically: Did the Times Crossword, started laundry, got a pot of chili in the oven (I like to braise chunks of chuck roast), then headed to the gym with Beth.

Sometimes normal is stupendous.

I hadn’t been feeling exactly sharp all day, but I’d hoped working up a sweat, hitting the sauna, and showering would change all that. Well, I lasted 10 minutes on the treadmill, had to cut the sauna short when I started feeling faint, and by the time I got home, I was an achy mess.

I had the flu but was still holding out hope that it was a garden variety bug until I got the worst case of the chills I recall ever having. Even with layers of blankets and the heat turned up, I could barely hold the cup of water Beth brought me to down a couple Advil.

The rest of the mornings, I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, the only thing missing was Sonny and Cher. I’d open my eyes. My head ached. My body ached. I’d take my temperature, hoping this was the day I’d see 98.6, it’d be 101 or thereabouts, I’d get down a hot tea or some broth, I’d feel good enough to check email and do a couple of work things, and then suddenly feel like my skeleton had been removed and I would just will myself to the bed where I would dissolve for several hours.

There were fever dreams, and I remember beginning to concoct what played as a bluesy-rock song in my head, with a chorus that went something like:

Chillin’ and a shakin’
Achin’ and a bakin’
I got the flu
Fa fa fa flu

I hadn’t been that sick for sometime, and I forgot how it leaves you vulnerable and nutty and schmoopy. I thought about people sicker than I was, people in the midst of chemo. Good God, like I needed to feel worse. I imagined being this sick—but being homeless, or in jail, or all alone or even sicker than I was and I just curled up tight in crazy gratitude that I was lucky enough to feel so awful in my own home in my own bed.

There were smatterings of news—Beth would have the radio on in the bathroom as she got ready to go out and teach her classes. Somewhere along the line I remember hearing about the journalist Bob Simon being killed. In a mundane traffic accident, of all things. I have this thing about dying in a car accident—I think it’s the absolute stupidest way to go—and truth be told, the older I get the stupider driving and its attendant risks seem. I mean, going out on a motorcycle, that’s a different story. As Hunter S. Thompson once said, “better to be shot out of a cannon than to be squeezed out of a tube.” Anyway. To hear a guy who’d cheated death and done so much good work under perilous circumstances got killed in the middle of Manhattan just left me deflated.

And then there were more stories about kids getting measles. When you feel like death, it reminds you how much grief is visited on people regardless of their best efforts. And to think any kid or any one is suffering because some morons won’t get their kids vaccinated was all the more infuriating. It’s a good thing for the anti-vaccine people that it took everything for me to get from the bedroom to the living room, or they’d have been in big trouble. (FYI, I did get the flu shot this year, as I have for the past 10–and this is the first year I’ve had the flu since 2005.)

Of course, there was the healthy living version of a foxhole conversion, also. I whispered in a fevered haze that I’ll only eat healthy food, I’d drink less, sleep more, and generally be much more boring as soon as I felt better. As if someone could grant that wish.

Then Saturday…I awoke…and my temperature read 98.4. No headache. No ache at all. Just looked like a ghost and felt limp. My appetite was back. Unfortunately, Beth had finished the chili the night before. It’s like it never happened. The chili, that is.

Right about now, though, pizza and beer sound pretty good.

It’s good to be back.