It’s a strange thing to realize that, a quarter of the way into the year as we almost are at this point, I’ve spent two out of the last three months basically sick and/or recovering from being sick. As much as I’m tempted to make a joke about this being a sign of my old age and obviously fragile body due to same — an impulse born of the desire to make that joke before anyone else can, because that’s just how uncomfortable I am about being 50 years old — the sad truth is, more than anything, I’m learning the limits of what I can, and can’t tolerate these days and realizing with no small sense of sadness that I just can’t bounce back the way I used to.
To be fair, I was literally told by multiple medical professionals that the virus-that-was-probably-the-flu was something that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over; when I was at the emergency room, I was given estimates of three weeks, maybe longer — a timescale that basically worked out, except it very much didn’t work out in that it ended just as I headed to Seattle for a week for work, running on longer-workdays-less-rest-and-less-food for that time and watching my health get knocked back as a result.
Things weren’t helped by the fact that there was, apparently, a second, entirely separate headcold running through the staff that probably dinged me as well; I can remember hearing about it from three different people within a five minute period on the second day of the show, each one giving me a different name of someone who’d mysteriously gotten sick the day before with exactly the same symptoms and thinking to myself, oh shit, I’m going to get sick again, aren’t I? (Spoilers: yes.)
There was a point just before I left Seattle where I was bent double over the bathroom sink, unable to stop coughing to the point where I coughed my throat raw and saw blood hit the sink where I thought, do I even remember what it feels like to be healthy anymore? Must be nice, and then immediately imagining myself still asking that question next month, or the month after that.
There has to be more to 2025 than being a plague year, I hope.