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.