SICK

I do not get sick very often. I have friends that must go to the doctor at least 10 times a year for one ailment or another. I am not saying that they do not have real issues nor am I tossing the hypochondriac word out there. I think that I must be pretty lucky. I get the same 4-day cold about three times a year. I also get some nasty flu bug (despite getting the shot) once every few years and that really is about it.

I have never had to stay overnight in a hospital and I have not broken too many bones. When I was three years old my brother Arthur and I were making ‘Bubble Land’ by blowing as many bubbles as fast as we could. I stumbled and rather risk spilling my bottle of bubble juice or losing the little intrinsically important to bubble production plastic stick, I held tightly onto both items leaving no hands available to break my fall. I landed on my face and broke my nose. My brother and sister laughed at me at the time and continue to tease me about not putting my arms out so as to prevent several months of walking around with a crooked schnozola.

When I was 13 I fell up a staircase and cracked two ribs. No one was there when I got home from school and discovered our new dog Smokey had gotten out of his create/cage and tore up the kitchen garbage. I ran after him to scold him but I slipped while chasing him up the stairs. With my feet in the air above the stairs, inertia kept my body flying forward as I flew up over the staircase until my lower chest landed on the corner of one of the top steps. With the wind knocked out of me, I rolled down the staircase.

I must have had a concussion because when I woke up on the floor I was dizzy and could not stand up with falling right back down. I crawled into my folk’s bedroom and got to the phone to call for help. The problem was the only phone number I could remember was (212) 936-3838. I kept dialing it over and over and over but since the number was for Dial-A-Joke, it did not really help me much. I laid on the floor with the phone listening to Henny Youngman repeat the same set of jokes over and over and over until my Mom got home.

A couple of days later I was horsing around during lunch at school when one of the science teachers caught me playing a joke on him. Not knowing that under my shirt I was taped up with two cracked ribs, he punched me in the chest to get me to shut up. It did but it also got me fall on the floor with a shooting pain. He was about to yell at me for over acting when someone told him what was up. I assume because he thought I might sue him and the school, he did not say a word to me for a week. Then he caught me after classes off school property and apologized. I told him it was my fault. I’m not sure if that made him feel any better but at the end of the year I had a great grade in Science.

During all the years I traveled I had some other various and sundry odd illnesses. One time I caught some freaky lung infection in Phoenix that was apparently common to the region. I thought I was having a heart attack but it was my swollen lung rubbing against my rib cage that made it hard to catch my breath. A nasty case of food poisoning made an incredibly stressful and busy day in Hartford really miserable. Another time in New York I got a stomach virus that forever changed my digestive system. Prior to being sick I could eat anything in any quantity and never have a problem. From the day I got over it, certain foods no longer agreed with me and I started occasionally having heartburn and acid reflux. I mangled my knee playing a midnight game of basketball in Los Angeles. It might have healed a lot quicker if I stupidly did not try to play on it again four days later. My little knee brace looked very nice under a suit.

I did have one bad spell about four years ago. The year started with a nasty case of the flu. Later some type of spider, that I must have an allergy to, thought there was an ‘all you can eat buffet’ sign on my arm. I had a really weird reaction to the bites and my elbow swelled up till I could not move it. The doctor told me there is not much to do except wait and see if a round of the usual antibiotics and a steroid shot would do the trick. The giant lump shrunk dramatically but for weeks afterwards there was a freaky little bump at the corner of my elbow that felt like it was filled with a stiff gelatinous glob of Silly Putty.

That same year I fell asleep on the floor one night and woke up with a shooting lower back pain. Most of my siblings have had back issues and my oldest brother attributed it to my turning 40. After a few days of waddling around like the Hunchback of North Dallas, my coworkers and wife talked me into going to a chiropractor. Aside from my sister’s ex practicing on my spine when he was in Chiropractic College 25 years earlier, I had never gone to a ‘back cracker’.

Going every week for a few months was not cheap and I honestly cannot say for sure if the treatments or time passage helped my back get better. Luckily I always had fun during my appointments; he was a very entertaining doctor with a sense of humor similar to mine. I started calling him Spine-Boy and his office was filled with all sorts of body part models and tools for me to play with. My back has been pain-free for over three years so I guess I should not complain.

I just told my wife what the topic of this blog was. She said that she might as well start using Airborn and Zycam right now. According to her there is no way I can write about not getting sick without a nasty case of ‘irony’ hitting and causing me to catch some horrible illness. Just to be careful, maybe I will wash down a couple of zinc pills with a half-gallon of orange juice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-A-Joke