Fear Of Landing

In sickness and in health

I was sick all weekend. One thing that becomes very obvious to me, when I am sick, is that my husband and I have different sick styles.

Me: At the first sign of sickness, my preference is to climb into bed and sleep. When I wake up, I get a drink, assess how I am feeling, and if I still feel sick it is right back to bed. If allowed, I repeat this pattern until I wake up and say, "wow, I feel good again" See, that is it. Continuous sleep and fluids.

Hubby: At the first sign of sickness, he announces that he is not feeling well. He proceeds to take different medications, complain about different medications, and go about his day as usual only quite a bit crankier. At bedtime, he wakes me up off and on all night, getting up and down, trying different stuff, getting the heating pad, etc... But his schedule does not change.

I used to think that my method was the best. That I would get better faster, but honestly it takes about the same time either way. The only difference is that I get to enjoy sweet sweet sleep, AND I am (theoretically) not an annoyance to anyone around me. Seriously, how can sleeping be annoying? Well, I think that I drive my husband insane. He is super sweet for about 24 hours. After that, his patience gives out. He typically picks day two of sickness to take on some big cleaning project around the house. I try to ignore him and not participate, but there he is, bustling around and getting the kids involved and I feel guilty. If there is nothing to do around the house, then it is the yard, or errands, busy work. Doesn't he know that I just want to sleep? Honestly though, I do have to admit here that I am sick more often than he is. I catch EVERYTHING.

Another thing I learned was that you should never take a medication that claims to work for 24 hours. Wanna know why? Cause you can't take anything else when the medication sucks. And believe me, this medication sucked. I finally gave in and took something else after about 15 hours and prayed that I wouldn't die from some fatal reaction. The good news is that I didn't die! The bad news is I still feel like crap even after a weekend of lazing around and doing not much of anything.

posted by fear.of.landing @ 8/27/2007