it's time to get ill

While I constantly maintain a sort of low-level state of general health (blocked nose, brain fatigue, insomnia, lower back pain), it's actually pretty rare that I am stricken with an illness that is so severe that I can't make it into work. I mean, every time I wake up with symptoms that you might associate with severe flu/being dead, but I find if I just 'fight through them', they rapidly dissipate over the next hour. This is has been my general strategy (and, I believe, most medical professionals) towards most health problems: ignore it, and it'll go away. And this really has stood me in pretty good stead over the years (even my hernias self-repair).

The alternative strategy to this, and the one mothers generally recommend, is to stay in bed and drink lots of fluids. Since getting a job that pays me whether I'm actually present at work or not, staying in bed has suddenly increased dramatically in its appeal, and since I'm not at all myself in the morning, I often awake to find it's midday and someone sounding suspiciously like me has called in sick for me and turned off my alarm.

My advice to you today is: Whatever healing strategy you go for, don't mix and match. This is what I did last week, and my body's been whiplashing all over the place trying to figure out which way to go:

Wednesday: Woke up feeling awful. Decided to 'fight my way through it', and had a semi-miserable day at work.
Thursday: Gave up on fighting through it, spent all day in bed. Watched every episode of Spaced and loved it to death. So, pretty productive.
Friday: Realized staying in bed hadn't made me better, so went back to work and had a fully miserable day infecting my colleagues. Went to a birthday party with an open bar, tried to kill infection with alcohol (that's what cough syrup mostly is, you know) and cigarettes (cause....infections....need....oxygen?), passed out on friends floor after finishing drunken late-night 'Cranium' session.
Saturday: Realized the 'fight through it' thing wasn't working even more than staying in bed, so sat on the couch all day watching an OC marathon. Realized I hadn't been missing much since I gave up TV.
Sunday-Monday: Tried to switch back to 'fight through it' mode. Got dressed, went outside, had apocalyptic coughing fit, went back to bed, stayed there for two days solid.
Tuesday: Still don't feel great, but I'm back at work. I hope they noticed how much doesn't get done when I'm not here. Heh.

Like Charles says at the beginning of (or, rather, in the prologue to) Brideshead,

as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and I felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, [my job] and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault.

Just kidding, boss! Back to work.