Good for What Ails You

I hate being sick. I do everything in my power not to get sick. I’ll work the preventive medicine if anyone around me has so much as a sniffle (hello, Airborne – you probably don’t do anything to keep me from getting sick, but I’ll take the placebo effect anyway). I avoid even the slightly and possibly germy and give them the widest birth possible (sorry to any family members I may have offended – it’s not you, it’s the bug). As a younger person, I would acquire face masks from the dentists and don them the moment my siblings looked under the weather. That probably didn’t bother them as much as my shock and awe dowsings of Lysol.

Should a bacteria or virus or worse decide to fell me, I do not acknowledge it. I try desperately not to speak its name and I certainly don’t feed it with over the counter medications. I won’t give it the power. I avoid going to the doctor at all costs. And we shall not speak of how I deal with anything beyond a stuffy head or sore throat.

My insanity concerning the subject of illness, meaning mine, is not your run of the mill crazy. Over the years, I have somehow convinced myself that when I actually am sick (we’re talking well beyond the take to your bed with an arsenal of pharmaceuticals), I’m not really sick. Seriously, it does not register. When I had to have my gall bladder removed, that was just a little corrective surgery, a malfunction. Certainly I wasn’t sick. When I had complications for weeks afterward, I was just weak from the recovery of said fixer upper procedure. Nope, not sick.

The weirdest mind trip of them all is that I have considered my pregnancies par for the course. Not uneventful, but not terribly unusual. I know what happened, and yet I still can’t think of any of it as being sick.

My first pregnancy was normal, right up until my due date. In fact, I was completely sure that the baby would be a week late. But at my weekly appointment, the doctor saw that my blood pressure was high and asked me (asked – it was a question, people) if I wanted to have a baby that day, I said no, thank you. I was perfectly happy to go back home and come back in a week. I can’t tell you how long it took both she and Chris to coax me into going up to labor and delivery, but it was more than a few minutes. And I was ticked.

I would say my first inkling that something was a bit off was when the word C-Section started to be bandied about. I asked for more time, and yet again had to be convinced that it was necessary. So, OK. Not what I wanted, but what was best for the baby. Here’s how I know I was medicated beyond belief, and therefore sicker than I could possibly recognize – when the pediatrician said that Sammy needed to go to the NICU for observation and that he needed an IV in his head, I didn’t flinch. I said sure, fine, whatever you need to do. If I was in my right mind, I would have Freaked. Right. Out.

Luckily, everything turned out healthy for both of us. We enjoyed our little 3 person family for 3 years until we started thinking about adding on to the unit. I was actually surprised when I found out I was pregnant. Super smart for someone who’d already been through this once.

All was peachy for a few months, until I starting feeling under the weather. That’s all I would call it. I thought sciatic nerve pain was causing the pulling in my back. While I don’t acknowledge illness, I do take good care of my babies from day 1, so there were several doctor visits in the week it took them to diagnose my kidney infection. And yet, in my mind, this was a complication of pregnancy. Not sick. Not even when they told me that I had a 50-50 chance of having the baby that night. I cracked then, but out of fear for my baby, not because I was in any way sick. Does not compute.

For the next 10 weeks, I grinned and bore it through an extremely tedious treatment so I could finish out my pregnancy. I made it, and knowing that makes me proud to know I was strong enough to beat something pretty tough. Another C-section (this one known in advance, so no surprise factor this time) and a healthy, very hungry baby. More complications for me in the days after her birth, but my mind still tells me these were little speed bumps in the road, that’s all.

I am blessed to have rebounded fairly quickly thereafter, and, knock wood, we’ve done pretty well since then. But, man, do I amaze myself with my bizarre coping mechanism. In each of those circumstances, I know what happened, I was right there in it. I even know I was the s-word. But that’s as far as I can go with it.

In closing, this better not jinx me. With 2 (OK, 3 – yes, you, Honey) kids running around, only top form is acceptable. Or allowed. Germs, step aside. Mom’s got work to do.

It's a cliché for a reason: these kids make me a lucky mom.

Now don't get sick.