I'm in bed on a warm night, after several days of clouds and rain. I'm sick, and not enjoying it in the least, unsurprisingly. I went to urgent care today for over an hour hoping to get some antibiotics which would unclog my right ear and make me feel less like shit, but to my surprise the MA flushed out my ears, and when a particularly persistent bit of earwax wouldn't move, the PA came in and removed a huge yucky gob. I swear I felt 16 through 20k Hz come flooding in my ear with the zealous hiss of a newly styled, ikea brand urgent care room next to a chipotle. I felt pretty banging after that to be honest, and even went to the store waiting for Walgreen to cash in my chips for Predinsone. They hadn't yet, and I resolved to return home where I loitered on my couch, intermittently awash with malaise and some notions of sweeping or walking. I resolved to do neither, instead choosing to venture back out to Walgreen after a brief confirmatory phone call that my prescription was available and affordable (a thrifty $1.79, which I only found to be slightly less agreeable when the slip informed me without insurance it would have been $11 or so dollars instead). I felt truly icky, and went pretty much straight home avoiding the roadwork on main street with a crafty U turn into the reticular neighborhoods on Mt Hope, so infrequently navigated by me in a car.
I returned home and mollified myself with another lengthy gambit of youtube, Futurama, water, and the occasional pill. I take a bit vitamin supplement of zinc, calcium, and something else when I feel sick because I couldn't find just zinc pills at first. I'm still not totally convinced that taking that vitamin is actually medically relevant to my immune system, but who am I to look a placeboic horse in the mouth. I've left all the windows open today and last night based on a hunch that my illness is somehow the result of collecting dust, debris, and cat fur in my house, perhaps spurring on a more severe allergy season than what the hot world outside is already making. Again, I have no way to prove this theory really but it did make me feel better; I often think that while not really medically founded, there is an undeniable comfort in the antiquated notions of "bad air", especially the idea that fresh air itself will cure some ailments. I don't suppose that's true, but I do think these sorts of common-sense difficult-to-prove gut reactions have more bearing on our health than we give them credit for in this age of evidence based medicine (pshaw!).
I'm not sure if I'll go to clinical for 12 hours tomorrow like I should. I noticed today that, when calling out sick, I feel tremendously guilty even when it is justified. The line for me between "sick" and "not sick enough" is hazy unless I have some clear and namable reason to be sick. If I just feel bad, but can't explain exactly why, I feel a little gaslighted, like I need a professional to name this thing to prove it's not just in my head, or that I'm not making it out to be worse than it is. In fact, I realized the bulk of mental anguish I endure when sick is caused not by the foggy headedness, or the tacit suffering of illness, but rather a twisted composition of guilt for missed obligations, missed opportunities, and the bare-bones fear that I don't actually know why I'm sick, when it'll be over, and how this will impact my life. Again, it quickly becomes framed in terms of what I can and can't control in life. Being sick is inevitable as a meat-bag person who lives in places, and when you get sick, it's usually a minor and unknown "bug" that basically tugs the wheel of your life enough to make you pump the brakes. Other drivers must think: "why is he stopping? Is he too depressed to keep driving? He probably could have just yanked the wheel back, no need to slow down." and you have to reply with a set of reasons which are sufficient to warrent your caution, but not so severe as to garner unwanted attention. If you're blowing chunks out boths ends, you might say "I have a stomach bug" to polietly inform your employer which of two acceptable bodily systems have malfunctioned, and in the case of the stomach, best not to go into too much detail. The other option is much more palatable, but also has a wider range of symptomes and rationals. A head cold could range from an invisible discomfort, maybe a change in voice or vigor, to full blow croup, water bottle on your head, and a cartoonish thermometer wagging out of the corner of your mouth. It's sort of up to you, when you're sicker than a little sick, but not so sick it's obvious you should see a doctor, to decide what to do, how much time to take off, and how to present your illness. I feel obligated usually to provide enough reason to any planned events such as work or school to feel that my choice to stay home, and shirk thiese responsibilities was beyond doubt, and absolutely a matter of fact and not my own judgement. I know that no one actually expects someone to rank their sickness using objective measures, and that especially post COVID, they would much rather you stay home than come to work with even the hint of illness. In someways that has been nice, you can get out of something with what once was a feeble excuse; a cough, a low grade fever, or frankly just saying I don't feel well. Any of those replies and, at least for the bulk of the past year, you were looking at 2 week quarantine, mandatory, no pay, regardless of test status or exposure. So instead, when faking or providing a reason somewhat more socially acceptable than "My depression and anxiety is manifesting as both an inability to face the world right now and also my tummy hurts", you have to skip right past anything vaguely covid related, which really cancels almost all of the clean and simple illessness. No head colds, no cough, absolutely no fever, the best you can hope for is food poisoning or orthopedic surgery.
I don't know why being sick takes up so much of my brain space, when it does. It takes over my life in a terrible way, because when you're pulled over on the side of the road, even if the sickness is just sitting in the back seat now mocking your pathetic water intake, you can't help but think of all the ways you can kick it out of your car, and how you'll get back on the road. Do you lurch back into traffic from the shoulder, sooner the better? Or should you get out and check your engine before you leave, make it clear you're in no rush, and wait the damn sickness out until it either gets tired of your choice of playlists or you flush it out with enough water, ibuprofen, and ugly sitting positions. If I were watching someone go through this, hell if someone I knew was actively in this process, it would be so easy for me to wave away the highway, explain how much more important it is to take your time than rush it, to impress the everloving importance of caring for yourself in contrast to the banal realities of life, even if facing them impaired as you will be in the next week seems too harsh to face. Myself though, probably prompted by proximity to the problem, all I can think about is the days I'm missing, the forms I'll have to fill out to reenter the highway, and all the other things I should be doing. Natural I suppose, and probably unavoidable, if not mitigatable. The other part though seems much more paranoid-adjecent, it's the part of me that needs to have a reason and a prognosis for every small thing. Why, why why, always asking why. But also what. What will happen if my hearing in this ear is gone for months? What if I never notice it going away, what if it keep happening chronically? What is this is the first in a series of symptoms and debilitating, humiliating, and terrifying hospital and doctors visits to address a strange and untreatable chronic illness that confounds experts despite all efforts and diligence??? As insane as it sounds, I'm confident thoughts like this get fired off like bottle rockets in the back alleys of my mind, only a sinister hiss and flash of light above my head, which pale in comparison to something so obvious as rationality. Like the moon, clear in the sky, known and trusted, eternal and noble, it's not that I'm ignoring the rational thoughts, that I will get better, this suffering is mild and fleeting, and it's statistically very improbably that I am patient zero in the next earwax over producing sinus infection pandemic. But I suppose my brain is programmed to be very good at listening for bottle rockets behind me, and I'm very tuned to the subtle changes in light above my head when they explode. That itself isn't bad, it's good, though impractical for this modern life of antibiotics and rapid tests. It's very hard to face down a fear of the unknown. It's probably the only hard thing we do, it just takes many forms.
The tricky thing about fear is that for me at least, my primary mechanism to address and neutralize it's threat is driven by my ego, the guy in the drivers seat, the part of my brain that drives for self preservation, the "me" inside me that knows about the rest of "me" outside. I think this is pretty normal, but what I find is that when faced with a fear which I cannot control, name, or outwit using my ego, the unconscious mind without is left vulnerable to deep visceral fears which are usually dressed up with a bow by my main driver there the ego. I'm not sure how deep this gets, probably all the way down to the lizard bits in some cases, but I'm fairly sure you don't have to go too far down the brain stem to reach the part that happily spews out the static fuzz of anxiety, a trickle and sometimes a flood that the ego in the pilots chair has to try and bail out. Rationalizing, thinking, and when the cabins getting really full, trying to stem the flow at the source. I think I usually do this sort of unconsciously, mitigating the sometimes healthy trickel of anxiety by quietly letting it pool around my feet, and slowly drip into the floor panels. When it is more of a torrent though, and I realize that some of my main processors and navigator machines are sparking and fizzing, I can direct myself to go straight to the anxiety out flow port and stick a a finger or a fist in it by explicitly stating the irrationality of it all. I can think to myself: "okay, that thought is stupid and here's a few reasons why" and if I'm being gentle, I'll even point to my controls, to the data logs where I've already processed a rational answer to this irrational grievance, and explain why calling out sick from a day of clinical is a good decision which will levey no grievances against your name by anyone. Sometimes, this appears to work, at least temporarily, but I don't think that's actually going to stop the anxiety tanks below deck from filling, it just slows down their quiet spurting into my mind. I think my other coping mechanism is to let it fill up, and leak out through the floor and the cracks in the walls, and through the seams between the machines that I use to drive my body around. Pot will dim the lights, turn the warning alarms on my monitors to quiet and infrequent, and let whatever anxiety is flooding into the cockpit just slosh around, waterlogging my dashboard until it drains a little. On the other hand, meditation is like being able to open up a release valve in the bottom of the anxiety tank itself, but there's no button on the control panel of my ego to do that. My approach is always that I need to send that little driver in my head down there, into my lizard brain, into the loud and hot machine rooms of my brain, and manually crank the valves I need to tune my big complicated mind. I guess this is possible, and sometimes the best option, but usually I imagine it's much better to instead remember that you are not the man driving the machine, you are not the jabbering ego rationalizing every fear and misstep for the benefit of some perceived onlooker. You are the machine itself, from the whirring motors to flashing lights, right down to the fucking nuts and bolts.
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Banking on the idea that I will in fact drive to Westerly and spend 12 hours learning and working there tomorrow, I'm going to try and go to bed. My 8 hours rapidly diminished as I type this (22:11 and a 1 hour drive to arrive at 7 leaves me with an optimal bedtime hour of 21:00).
I do feel better, albeit swettier (and colder? wtf) and I'm hoping my second dose of steroid tomorrow will help boost me to feeling "up for it". Even though I know I could take tomorrow off too, I really don't want to. I think despite my validating my feelings for self care, what would make me feel better is to actually go there, even if I do suffer through it a little. Worst case scenario, I have to suffer the additional embarrassment of verbalising my discomfort to the staff and requesting I leave early. Either way I should get some rest.
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