Feeling like a lukewarm plate of garbage today. If you could get a grade for being sick, I would get a C-. Not a D or an F, because I still show up when I absolutely have to, but also not an A or B because my inner monologue while ill is the stuff of Shakespeare.
“But hark! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East and Coronavirus is the sun!”
It doesn’t help that this week at work, I have been answering questions nonstop about how the epidemic will affect client travel/can they cancel/are we all going to die?
Yes Judy, just not all from coronavirus and not all today.
Now that I think about it, maybe I contracted this chest cold from the amount of time reading/talking/writing about viruses. Or FaceTiming my sister whose entire family has been passing it around like a diseased hot potato. Little tiny particles traveled through the series of tubes that make up the internet, erupted from the screen and into my nasal passages.
Someone alert Vice President Pence! His first order of business is to scrub the airwaves.
Can you imagine if we could transmit disease electronically?
Wait, never mind, don’t imagine that.
But I digress. I know it wasn’t the internet, or the power of suggestion. It was my coworker. One of the things my brain likes to do is fantasize that it knows the exact moment of disease transmission. Like an episode in a medical drama, a montage of moments plays in my mind:
I walk back to the breakroom to refill my water bottle. Coworker is there, washing his
lunch dishes. I turn from the fountain at the same moment he turns, coughing.
I hold my breath as I walk through the invisible cloud of cough, but it’s too late.
Time slows. Minute water droplets, infected with the virus, hang suspended in the air. A
few enter my lungs, milliseconds before my mouth snaps shut.
That song from Platoon plays as over the next 48 hours, my immune system begins to
battle the intruder.
lunch dishes. I turn from the fountain at the same moment he turns, coughing.
I hold my breath as I walk through the invisible cloud of cough, but it’s too late.
Time slows. Minute water droplets, infected with the virus, hang suspended in the air. A
few enter my lungs, milliseconds before my mouth snaps shut.
That song from Platoon plays as over the next 48 hours, my immune system begins to
battle the intruder.
That’s it, that’s how it happened.
Fortunately I live alone, and have only myself to take care of.
Can you imagine if I had a husband or children?
“Small ones, Mommy is unwell. Play quietly to yourselves for the next eight hours til your father gets home. If you get hungry, there are fruit snacks in the cupboard above the stove. Just push a chair over to the counter to climb up. Change your own diapers, or better yet, potty train yourselves. Not too much noise now, it hurts my head.”
So props I guess, to moms and dads and caretakers.
As for me, I will wrap myself in my fuzziest scarf, drink hot tea, and hope the power of positive thinking heals me quickly.
Just kidding, I will call my mother and complain, tweet about it, and finally write a blog post.
Stay healthy, my friends.
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