It’s bad enough to have a monkey on your back, but when it keeps returning, that’s another sort of trouble. I’d call it a Boomerang-utan.
I don’t know how chronically ill people manage to keep their sanity, but I know that many do. I am far too wimpy and impatient and irritable to imagine just how I would do such a thing. Having had something I suspect is like an underlying infection this winter that meant that instead of the typical one-or-none quantity of winter colds I ended up with three or four successively worse ones, ending (I hope!) in the latest one that arose from my strep throat and morphed through a head cold on into intensified allergies that I had not even known I had, I got a teeny, tiny taste of the miniature germ-monster version of chronic disease. Every time I thought I’d knocked the junk out of my system for good, wham! It reemerged.
Unlike more saintly persons’, my reaction was to become just that much more irritable and old-lady-ish and self-absorbed than usual. Yikes. If any good can be said to have arisen from the adventure, it is that I had some quality time to focus (as much as I was able to do any such thing) on some thoughts that have been lurking in my mind quite a bit lately about health, aging, and the health care systems of this country and others as they relate to an ever-growing and ever-aging world population. Far from solving the problems of generations past, we seem to be expanding upon them and adding to them exponentially while not devoting anything like a proportionate quantity of attention to improving our use of limited resources in caring for our selves, let alone for the world community.
It’s nothing to monkey around with, I assure you. But all wise-cracking aside, I will share some few of these thoughts further with you in a near future post or two. Meanwhile, I am virtually swinging from the trees with happiness at having emerged relatively unscathed and, I sincerely hope, freed from the ongoing attentions of any neck-hanging apes of the illness-related kind as I move onward again. May more people the world over have such good fortune.
Art-Colored Glasses 
I do hope it really has finally let go of your immune system, and all the germies and such give you a break. Glad to hear you’re feeling a bit better now. It’s tough being perpetually ANYTHING, including sick. 🙂
Thank you, my dear. I think I’ve finally kicked the strep and cold junk, thanks to a combination of time and home remedies and a second round of antibiotics (thank goodness I very rarely require those!). Working on the whole re-balancing act of straightening out my thyroid, allergies, and whatever else messed with my immune system so unusually. I still know that I have it EASY compared to what many others go through, one way or another. 😉 🙂 😀
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Kathryn, I hope you have finally chucked those bugs; they make us feel rotten. As for the chronically ill, of whom I am one, I wasn’t sane to begin with so I have no chance! 😄. However among the insanity we just have to get on with it. If we don’t we will surely sink. I’ve never been a good swimmer but I’m giving it all I’ve got these days. And on the bright side, I have met some wonderful people who I probably would never have encountered otherwise, one of whom will be featured in my next blog post 😊 xx
Darling, you know I wouldn’t’ve found your company so compelling if you were too sane! I do, however, consider you an excellent role model for being honest about when it’s hard to be patient with yourself or others, when it’s just plain a genuine pain to hang in and hang on, and how much cleverness it takes to overcome the monotony and frustrations and losses. You are a champion and a heroine to me. Besides being fun and sweet and all of that other delightful stuff. 🙂
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Just read a terrific book called “Being Mortal” by Atul Gwande that deals with these issues. Highly recommended.
Oops, that’s Atul Gawande.
A perfectly mortal typo to make. I’m sure that fine author has had ‘moments’ as well! I’ll ask my eats-books-for-survival sister if she’s read this, too. 😀
Sounds like a woman after my own heart.
Yup. 🙂
I think many people ( not all;) deal the best they can and like you, rejoice in feeling better and grateful our conditions aren’t worse. Glad you’re feeling good!
It’s so wonderful to feel well that it’s good to be reminded what a gift that is and how fortunate we are who get to enjoy it most of the time! 🙂