Ugh…

A few weeks ago, my immune system succumbed to the nastiness that’s been going around. For the record, I blame the whole broken finger thing, which you can read about in my last blog post, here, and this is why:

1. I made a visit to Urgent Care, which is mostly frequented by sick people, and is therefore probably a germ playground.
2. I haven’t been as diligent as I normally am about hand washing, because it’s a pain to try to do it with a splint on your middle finger.
3. Because the skin was broken near the fracture, they put me on antibiotics (to protect me from the possibility of getting a bone infection), which caused a whole host of other weird body things (that you’ll thank me not to discuss), and my immune system was probably all sorts of confused.

I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened, though. It did. And then, just as I finally finished the antibiotics and was recovering from its effects, the virus descended. And then I was loopy, and sleepy, and headachey, and sniffly, and coughy, and sneezy, and germy for days. I was like the seven dwarves of sickness, all rolled into one gross, tired lump. I still went to work when I was scheduled to because I’ve never been one to take sick days unless I really, really needed them. I think I took maybe 3 actual sick days in my 11 years of teaching. But it occurred to me today that this new job I have isn’t like teaching was. When you’re a teacher, it’s more work to be gone than it is to just show up sick, in my experience. Not only do you have to prepare plenty of work to keep the kids busy and accomplish some sort of learning, practice, or assessment while you’re gone, when you come back, you have to figure out what the sub actually did with them (because, sadly, some just don’t do anything), and check all the work, and still be ready to teach and move on that day when you’re probably still recovering from whatever it was you were sick with. But with my new job, I likely don’t need to worry about finding someone to take my place. I could just call in sick, and the day would go on, and I wouldn’t really have extra work waiting for me when I came back. But it still didn’t feel right to me not to go.

I know some of you are probably like, “KIM. STAY HOME SO YOU DON’T MAKE OTHER PEOPLE SICK.” And I get that. But I try really hard to be a courteous sicko. I disinfected just about everything I touched, including the scrolling wheel in the mouse I was using. And I always practice the “vampire cough/sneeze”. And, in the future, when I’m more comfortable with the idea of actually using sick time, I might actually use it. I just wasn’t quite there yet. And then I wasn’t scheduled to work for a few days, so I had some time to rest and recover without having to miss work.

Luckily, my run streak is still intact, thanks to The Bearded One and his also-bearded friend (Thanks, Patrick!). Just as the weather actually turned wintery and the germs attacked me, they moved TBO’s treadmill and got it set up in my dad’s heated shop (because we really don’t have room for it in our house). Some of the runs were pretty rough, but I was able to get them all done, even on the days that were spent almost entirely on the couch.

Even though I was frustrated by this whole sequence of events, I also tried to find ways to be grateful in my malaise. I’m grateful I had The Bearded One to help pick up my slack with dog care duties and my mama nearby to take on more of the chicken care duties. I’m grateful that I have a job that allows me (somewhat affordable) access to healthcare, even if it did sort of indirectly lead to my sickness. But most of all, I’m grateful that I only had a bad cold, and that it passed on its own. It’s totally cliché, but the older I get the more I realize how much I’ve taken my relative good health for granted. AND the more I realize that it may not last if I don’t start to take better care of myself. That’s partly why I started the run streak, and partly why I quit teaching, and partly why I’m trying to take steps to improve my diet, and partly why I’m making a concerted effort to get more sleep regularly.

According to P.T. Barnum (circus master, extraordinaire and, if The Greatest Showman is to be believed, fantastic singer and dancer), “The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune; it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.” I don’t necessarily aspire to accumulate a huge fortune–that’s never been my primary goal. But I do want to be able to make enough money to live fairly comfortably, see some other parts of the world, give some support to people in need and organizations that are doing good things, and have a positive impact on the world in some way. And I’m still not sure exactly how to get there. But I have plenty of ideas, and it’s time I really got started on them. In The Greatest Showman, which I think you should watch if you haven’t, there’s a song that always makes me teary, because I, too, have a million dreams that keep me awake sometimes.

But I know that I’ll never make it to a world of my own design if I don’t start really setting goals and making a plan of action to stick with them. I believe it was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince) who said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish“, which is absolutely true. So I think I need to make that my mantra going forward. At least until I get better at the following-through process. And now, since I let my blogging lapse again, I’m going to post this and dive into my calendar to plan out when I’ll write and post the next few. Because I have a goal to post weekly, and “A goal without a plan is just a wish“.