Up The Covers
Sunday. As I said, having been through these periods of flu before, I have no complaint about how this one is proceeding. The really miserable period is over; the thing has settled into the chest with the usual cough, but nothing too rattling. I just need time to recover, time that will run out tomorrow morning when I show up again at the office. Unless I don't. I assume I'm out of the communicable phase, but you never know until you know and I will know because someone will tell me (with a cough and a three to five day absence).
It's no doubt the swine I work with - two of whom have young children who trade airborne maladies like baseball cards, slipping the odd duplicate to one or the other of their parents at least weekly - and from whom I've caught it. Life is like that. If you don't pick it up at your desk in front of your computer, you pick it up on the sidewalk inadvertently inhaling a mutant germ at some wrong moment; touching the hand rail of an escalator recently stroked by Typhoid Larry; thumbing your nose at a picture in the newspaper over coffee, having reached over to pet your cat on whom a passing plague flea was temporarily lodging just the moment before.
You call it the flu?
Whatever it is, it takes the same course of action: it comes every year or three; it usually comes in the fall with the change of the season, but sometimes it comes in the spring and sometimes, in some rare years such as this year, it comes in the fall and the following spring and I have no doubt one day, when I'm (hopefully) much older, it will come and I will go and that will be the show for this fellow and his journal. But we shall leave that for the future. Meanwhile I am sitting here, better, but having had breakfast at the usual cafe, having read the Sunday paper, thinking, after these five days out of action, maybe I should get back into bed and pull up the covers.
|
