Sick In the Summer

Is there anything worse than being sick? Yes, there is - being sick in the summer. We’re all kind of used to getting sick in the dead of winter, but being sick at the height of summer is just wrong. Summer is supposed to be long, lazy days of friends, fun, and games. It’s supposed to be a time to relax and chill out, not have the chills. So when my son recently was sick for a few days, I really felt for him.

Luckily for him, my wife and I weren’t like my Mom and didn’t make him stay inside for a couple of extra days just to make sure he was truly better. Back when I was growing up, Mom always made us stay in and do next-to-nothing for an extra day after being sick. I don’t really know if it was make sure we were no longer sick or if it was just a deterrent to faking sickness so we could miss a day of school (of course, I never did that!). Either way, I didn’t want to have to stay in the house any longer than I had to, especially in the summer.

Who would want to miss a couple of days of wiffle ball, playing catch, riding bikes, and chasing the ice cream man for a freebie? Certainly not me or any of my old friends. Even on those sauna-like August days when we just sat under a tree and read our comic books or Mad magazine while listening to our AM transistor radios, it was so much better than being cooped up in the house. As you can probably guess, growing up in a family of nine, we had no air conditioners in the house. That is, unless you consider opening up the windows and turning on the big blue fan in the living room air conditioning. I really didn’t care for staying inside.

I remember one summer when I was about 10 years old, I had a headache and was really hot, so I told my Mom. She took my temperature and it turned out that I had a fever. Mom gave me some aspirin (St. Joseph’s aspirin for children, chewable and supposedly orange flavored - blah) and made me go lie on my bed and read so that I would get better quicker. I wasn’t supposed to do anything outside of that bed in my room. While I laid there staring up at the ceiling, contemplating how to get out of the mess I got myself into, I could hear the kids in the neighborhood outside, running around, and doing what I wanted to be doing. I don’t know which made me feel worse, having a fever or hearing my friends having a great time outside.

At some point I fell asleep and woke up a few hours later feeling much better, so I went and told Mom that I was ready to go outside. She politely told me that I still needed to rest, and that I needed to stay in the house. There was no argument, no trying to convince her I was okay, and no chance I was getting out of the house. Maybe, she said, I could go out the next day if kept getting better. Miracle of miracles, I was better the next day. There was absolutely no way I was going to tell her I didn’t feel anything but wonderful. I was going out and I wasn’t going to miss another precious day of vacation. Ah, but Mom had other ideas and I had to stay in another day, “just to make sure.” If I ever got sick in the summer again, I don’t remember telling Mom, because that meant multiple lost days of being outside with friends.

So my son got over whatever he had after a few days and went back to his normal life; work, friends, being out of the house, and enjoying the summer. The amazing part was that this all happened without being forced to stay in the house, up in his room, for one extra day. I wish I could have had that when I was a kid, whether I got sick in the winter, spring, summer, or fall. But like I said, there’s nothing worse than being sick in the summer.

Pains

I work for a software company and work in an office so I don’t do any physical work, unless you call carrying my laptop to a meeting physical work. I can also work from home and connect to the office, so if I’m not feeling so great, I can still work. I don’t get sick too often anyway, so I don’t miss many days from work. Add to all that the fact that no one in the media is following me around or analyzing every move I make and I’d say I have a pretty cushy work life. 

Sometimes I feel bad for professional athletes, especially in sports-obsessed cities like Boston. As a former wannabe athlete, I can tell you that no one wants to get hurt and they don’t want anyone to know they got hurt. So these guys play when they’re hurt (hello Patrice Bergeron of the Boston Bruins) and don’t let on as to how bad they really are. At times, they’re not playing well and we find out later that they’ve been battling a serious injury for days or weeks. Then in cases where someone is hurt and they’re perceived as not toughing it out and still playing, they’re ripped in the media and on every sports talk show by every know-it-all “expert” alive (hello pretty much all the major league baseball players).

When I was in high school I hurt my throwing arm at the beginning of the baseball season but I didn’t tell the coach because I wanted to play. When I couldn’t throw the ball from shortstop to first base anymore the coach finally asked me what the heck was wrong with me. When I told him my arm was killing me he wanted to know why I hadn’t told him earlier. I told him that it hadn’t been that bad until the last couple of days and that I wanted to play. What I didn’t tell him was that I had a childhood incident that haunted me and wouldn’t let me say I was hurt.

We were having one of our neighborhood softball games in our backyard on a nice sunny day. We had about five guys on each team, including three of my older brothers. We had been playing for a while and we took a break to get some water. In those days we didn’t go in the house to get a drink of water, we drank the water right out of the hose. There was nothing like a cold drink out of the hose on a hot summer day. Plus, you could soak your hat or your shirt and stay cooler longer. Mom wouldn’t have let us do that at the kitchen sink.

We all got our drinks and went back to the game. However, I think that I drank too much water because when I started running around again I got a really bad stomach ache. When it was my team’s turn in the field, I couldn’t even stand up straight so I lay down on a picnic bench. I guess no one on my team noticed because the inning started and the first batter hit an easy ground ball right to the spot I should have been in. Needless to say, my brother that was pitching was not happy when he saw me laying on the bench.

When he asked me what I was doing over there laying on the bench, I didn’t quite know what to say so I responded in a pitiful voice “I’ve got pains!” When everyone stopped laughing five minutes later, the mocking began. For the next few minutes after that, I was treated to “I’ve got pains” being said in high pitched voices or like a 3-year old. I was just a kid myself, but I was humiliated. I think I heard that wonderful phrase from my brothers for the next five years whenever I felt sick or got hurt doing something.

So when my coach asked me why I hadn’t told him I was hurt it was kind of a matter of pride. I guess in some small way, I didn’t want him to make fun of me for having a sore arm. In retrospect, I probably humiliated myself by not being able to reach first base from shortstop. I don’t know, maybe some professional athletes had similar situations to mine when they were kids and as adults their pride kicks in, too, and they play hurt.

I’m glad that I don’t get sick much and I can take a day off when I need to without being made fun of or mocked. I just hope that as I head into my senior years I don’t have to lie down on a bench somewhere because “I’ve got pains.” 

The BIG FIVE OH

Last week I celebrated my birthday, and not just any run-of-the-mill birthday, but a milestone birthday. One week ago, I celebrated my 50^th birthday! It was a pretty good week, as birthday wishes poured in almost every day. Well, OK, they didn’t pour in every day, but I did get at least one just about every day of the week. Then last Saturday, we had a party at my house and lots of my friends and family stopped by for some food, some hanging out and lots of laughs. It was a great time!

One thing I find amusing was the number of people who thought I would try to hide the fact that I was turning 50, like it was something bad. I can just picture two people talking in hushed tones:

“Did you hear about Joe?”

“No, what’s up with him?”

A quick glance around. “He’s turning…50.”

“Oh, no! How’s he doing? Is he OK?”

Yeah, I’m OK. Really. One of my brothers cracked that “50 is the new 30”. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that 50 is not that old. Statistically speaking, I can expect to live another 25-30 years. And with all the preservatives I’ve eaten of the years, maybe another 35-40 years! Who knows, maybe some brilliant researcher will find the fountain of youth or figure out a way to slow the aging process. Because if I’m going to live to 90 or 100, I want to be healthy. Right now, thank God I am. Besides, being eighth out of nine, I have siblings that are already into the 60’s and they don’t seem old to me. Even if they are grandparents.

So after a great birthday week, I spent the first week of my new year…sick. Now I expected a bit of a letdown after the big 5-0, there always is in the days following a big event, but this was not just a letdown. It was a beatdown. For two days, the biggest thing I did was move from the bed to the couch downstairs so I could watch some TV, or move from the couch to the bed upstairs so I could go to bed. That was after sleeping for more than half the day. Over those two days, I ate one piece of toast, one bowl of Tasteeos cereal (a generic and better version of Cheerios) and a couple of scoops of ice cream. That’s it. Maybe that’s why people talk in hushed tones about turning 50!

As I lay there on the couch the second day, I of course thought back to being sick as a kid. Other than a short stretch in third grade, I didn’t get sick much. Maybe it was because of the rules Mom had for when we were sick. It wasn’t a fun time staying home from school, which is probably why we didn’t like it much. We had to stay not just in our room, but in our bed. There was no TV allowed. We could read in our bed or we could rest in our bed. When we got a little older there were no phone calls from friends allowed either. For meals, we got toast, maybe some soup. For drinks, we got water, some orange juice and, if we were lucky, warm ginger ale.

But this was the rule that always made me think if I really needed to stay home: if you missed one day of school because you were sick, you needed to stay home one more day to make sure you were better. So if you were sick on Tuesday, you stayed home on Wednesday, too. If you were sick on Thursday, you had to stay home on Friday. This meant that when we got older, we couldn’t go out on Friday night. Oh, and by the way, you probably couldn’t go out on Saturday either because you needed to get your rest and make sure you didn’t get sick again and miss school on Monday. The result of being sick on Thursday was that you didn’t go out of the house until you went back to school on Monday morning, except maybe for church on Sunday, and only if you seemed to be totally well. I can remember a few times feeling kind of sick on a Thursday but going to school anyway so that my whole weekend was spent sitting in the house doing nothing.

As much as I didn’t like it back then, I appreciate it now because I don’t miss work just because I don’t feel like going into the office. I really need to be sick or I’m going in. Maybe it’s being responsible or maybe it’s because I hear a little voice in the back of my head reminding me of the rules of being sick. And dry toast with some warm ginger ale is just not going to cut it these days.