Sick

Bleh—I’m home sick today. I had crampy, middle-of-the-cycle pelvic pain all day yesterday at work, and I’ve always been one of those women who gets at least a twinge of pain around ovulation, so I thought not much of it. I went out with a friend after work and noticed that the pain began to increase, so we called it a night early and I went home. I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, fell asleep and woke up later with the kind of dry, baking heat that you know without even getting your thermometer is a fever. I’m thinking that I should’ve maybe gone to the emergency room, but I never quite woke up enough to do anything other than whimper a little and feel sorry for myself. Finally, I woke up again around 4am feeling utterly wrung out but with a clear sense that my little quickie fever had broken.

So I called in sick today, as I just couldn’t picture walking from the parking lot to my office, let alone spending the day being useful to others. It felt weird—I NEVER call in sick—but I’m glad that I did. I slept till 10:45 and have spent the day drinking loads of water, eating not much and laying around. I’m still not ready to take on the world, but I’m lots better, and whatever organ was behaving like an angry stepchild in my abdomen has calmed down.

Here’s the bit that has to do with weight-loss/body issues (in case you were wondering): All day, laying around feeling like low-energy, glum, sweaty crap, I’ve caught myself repeatedly being self-critical. It’s as if some rational part of my brain can acknowledge that something was wrong with me and I need a day of recovery. But there’s some deeper part of me, one that speaks in a barely audible whisper, that tells me how all of this is my fault. It says “You’re feeling punk because you don’t exercise enough. How can you expect to ever feel chipper and healthy if you lay around like you always do.” What the hell? If any real life, outside-my-own-head person told me this, I’d shake my head in wonder and dismiss them. But the voice inside my head? From in there, it has the tiny, horrible ring of truth.

It’s been this way since I was little. I had my first asthma attack at age 3, after playing in a pile of leaves and having a big allergic reaction. I don’t remember feeling the least bit self-critical about that. But as I got a little older, I gradually got chubbier and less good at the athletics, and I came to see the whole thing—the whole sad, fat, unathletic, wheezy package that was me—as somehow my fault. I thought I was asthmatic because I was chubby, and I was chubby because I was somehow essentially lazy. I became so embarrassed about my failings that I never told anyone how I felt, which is too bad because someone might have been able to set me straight about the causes of asthma and how it was not my fault. It took me years of therapy to untangle that sad little ball of beliefs and to realize that it still rolls around in my head and informs how I feel about myself. At least now I can recognize it, and I can fight back. Still, when I remember what that felt like, I feel sorry for the little girl I was. She deserved to feel better about herself. Maybe now I can finally help her out with that.