Convalescing from a nasty bit of stomach flu — or virus or whatever it was that sent me flying to the bathroom on Saturday night, hoping to minimize the messy side-effects of reverse peristalsis — has me in a ghostly state of mind. Not being wretchedly sick is oddly like not being alive, or the idea of it anyway. Convulsed with physical misery, you long for release, and release, when it comes, feels like heaven — but an empty heaven, one in which there is nothing to feel, not even boredom.

Recovering from a bout of good old-fashioned upchuck tipped me off to the way in which our manner of speaking about illness hasn’t caught up with the way in which medicine has changed it — especially for those of us who are older. Traditionally, the doctor’s job was to cure disease — to make it go away. People were either sick or they weren’t. But much of modern medicine is aimed at symptoms. Nothing has been done to cure the autoimmune disease that has turned my spinal column into one long bony mass, and that would afflict me with low-grade arthritis if it were not for remedial infusions of Remicade. I’m sick all the time, in other words; I just don’t feel it. The same goes for my hypertension issues. As I get older, the list is likely to longer — until it gets fatally short.

There are certainly days when I don’t “feel well.” I’m not sick, but I’m tired, creaky; sometimes, I’ve had too much wine the night before. The worst thing about not feeling well is the guilt at not getting things done. The wasted time hurts as badly as watching money fly out the window would. But when I’m really sick, this is not a problem. I don’t have the mental space for guilt. Either I’m in agony, seeking release in that vacant heaven, or I’m there, not feeling much of anything. On balance, I’ll take the guilt that goes with not feeling well.

Convalescing is a pleasant way of not feeling well, and I tried to make as much tried-and-true use of the day after as I could. I read two books and watched two movies. The books were Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — I was already about halfway through — and Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason. Both were obviously delightful or I’d never have been able to look at them. The movies — neither of them “delightful” — were Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der aderen Seite) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). There’s a tremendous, if incidental, sadness to The Lives of Others: Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, the diligent and committed Stasi agent who turns out to be “a good man,” died at about the time the film was being shown in the United States.

My indisposition was not without comic incident — ha ha. On Thursday, a glance at my Google calendar told me that we were scheduled for brunch with friends on Sunday. I’d have to cancel, I knew, because Kathleen was running off to Miami Beach for an impromptu getaway with another friend. But I dithered. On Saturday afternoon, I was on the point of picking up the phone when I procrastinated yet again, this time fatally, if not for me than for good manners. You can imagine how appalled I was when the doorman rang up our friends early on Sunday afternoon. You can imagine how appalled our friends must have been when I greeted them in the corridor — in my bathrobe! I can only imagine how appalled they were, though, because outwardly they were wonderful about it. It’s a pathetic thread to hold on to, but I can say that nothing like this has ever happened before! And it will never happen again, either.

I’ve been taking it easy today, but not so easy that I couldn’t change the sheets. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.