Just Call Me Job

With apologies to taking all of you on yet another Incredible Journey through my "enfleshed existence," as we theology wonks like to say...it's like this: My new prescription is helping me with my one health issue (so to speak); I've started getting over the Flu From Hell, enough to go to work; but now I seem to be developing some kind of scary, abscess-y problem with the gum around my back molar. If it's not better by tomorrow morning I am going to have to go the dentist.

And I'm laughing. I'm laughing because that's pretty much all that's left for me to do, because my life has turned into a kind of cartoon, with me in the role of Wile E. Coyote, and my numerous recent ailments the ACME anvils landing on my head.

When I was a small child, I had no disease resistance. At five, I came down with pneumonia three times, plus tonsilitis. I honestly remember more about being in the hospital, or convalescing at home, than I do about my kindergarten class. I had a keen sense of my own mortality, even at that young age; because of that, and because I was a precocious reader, stories of pale, bedridden Victorian children resonated with me. One of my favorite poems in those days was from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses:

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

Then...I got over it. A new doctor came to town and started shooting me up with gamma globulin -- the magic bullet of pediatric medicine in the 60's, I think -- to build up my immune system. It hurt like heck -- the injections burned like Drano -- but it worked. I toughened up. I stopped missing school.

And so I became a Healthy Person. For years; decades. I'd get the standard going-around bugs, miss one or two days of work a year, but that was it. No cavities, even.

And now I feel five years old again. Every day is some new assault on my immune system. I feel like burrowing under my counterpane and staying there for a long time.