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22 February 2009
What are you like when you're sick? What is your SO like?
My wife knows by now not to try to take care of me when I'm sick. I just want to be left alone in a quiet place and hate people pushing vitamins or chicken soup on me.
I usually have to work through it, as I tend to get a cold at the most inconvenient times - like right now!!! My SO, well, he is tall and tough, but when he is sick? He's a big baby.
Heh heh, my S.O. just peeked over my shoulder and said, "Yeah, people are babies when they are sick!" (He doesn't know my username, or it didn't register that I was talking about him!)
We're both normal and non-babies when we're sick with a cold or something similar. We're quiet and non-complaining.
If I have a mild injury I can be a little dramatic. If I stub my toe, you're going to hear my wails. My kids and husband tune me out. I can step on a piece of glass and let out some cries and none of them come to my rescue or asks me what's wrong! :-) If I injure myself for real there's not much drama.
I'm kind of like octothorpe and birdherder; getting sick totally disrupts my day to day activities and I'll try and spend as much time as I can in bed not doing anything. I don't know if this does anything to speed my recovery along, though.
But I would never pass up soup or a hot meal if it were offered to me.
Me: big baby who has to take care of herself and hates it. I almost never go to work sick, because I have a few coworkers who do, and they always spread it around the office. I only go in if it's an absolutely can't miss day. When the bf was here, he'd bring me flowers and cook for me when I was sick, which I loved. One time, he cleaned my kitchen before he left for the day. I'm sick now and was just complaining to him how much it sucks to be sick when he is far away.
Him: his sister says he's a big baby, but he's only been sick a few times since I've known him (he's a healthy bunny). One time when we were both sick, he refused to kiss me for a week so we wouldn't spread germs back and forth and would make me get out of bed if I sneezed in the middle of the night to wash my hands.
I've lived with men who either (a) pretend there's absolutely nothing wrong, no sir, and let's go work in the greenhouse for a few hours, or (b) hole up in front of the television in bunny slippers, watching soaps in quiet misery.
If it's a minor sickness, I try to get on with my life to the extent that I'm non-communicable. If it's something more persistent or clearly meriting some recovery time, I let my body make the call. I am never averse to calling out from work.
I have admittedly developed more of a spine in my late 20s and early 30s than I had as a younger adult. The present Me would have hated to live with 23yo Myke.
My husband has been curled up in bed all night & morning (it's noon here now). So far I've gotten him Nyquil, cough drops, Theraflu, tea with honey, oatmeal, Pedialyte (left over from when he had the flu), and a box of Kleenex. I bought sherbet & ice cream for when he feels good enough to come downstairs.
I like taking care of him until he gets cranky. Then it's back to bed for him and "I'll be downstairs until you can be nice."
Me, I'm pretty stoic when I'm sick, but he's good at taking care of me anyway.
I'm not sure what I'm actually like when I'm sick, but I believe that I'm slightly cranky but still fairly "get 'er done" about it. I've had some weird respiratory thing all week that's made me feel like crap, but I've been working (I did beg off one late-night support group thing, because I've been crashing every day at about 5pm and I knew I'd be useless any later than that).
I don't think ikkyu believes I'm actually sick until I start running a fever, but he seems to enjoy fetching aspirin and admonishing me to take it on a regular basis.
He doesn't get sick all that often, but he seems to get cranky in pretty much the same way I do when he's coming down with something. I think we're actually better at diagnosing each other's impending illnesses because we pick up on each other's crankiness sooner than our own.
I typically just shuffle my way through the day (I will try to sleep more and drink more OJ/other delicious fluids and not touch things) but I don't get very ill very often.
The last time I had any sort of serious illness where I should've cancelled everything and curled back up into bed was when there was some seriously nasty stomach bug thing going around and when my friend called me to tell me that she was an hour away, I started vomiting profusely, but still managed to drag my ass to Baltimore, walk around for 2 hours, drive to the mall, go shopping for another hour, and then drive her back to Baltimore.
Mom will whine about it but will just suffer through whatever else she has to do. Pops will lie in bed and sniffle. My brother (he who refuses Tylenol) will fight through damn near anything until he passes out.
Not to be depressing, but I'm sick more often then healthy, so I guess I'm normal when I'm sick? I live my life somewhere between car sick and morning sickness, no car or baby needed. When I'm actually feeling well, I bounce off walls because I'm so HAPPY to feel not sick. I ran to the coffee shop and up three flights of stairs in celebration yesterday. It was awesome.
Pie is a trooper when sick. He'll sleep and is generally sweet and apologetic. I made him soup last time. He was happy, even though I couldn't find matzo balls.
I used to be quite stoic and hardly ever complained when I was sick. In September 2000 when I had optic neuritis, I was given a lumbar puncture and I spent the following 2 weeks in agony and immobile and praying for death. Since then I've been a lot more sensitive to pain and sickness and I'm now pretty crap at coping with being unwell, especially with colds and flus. I will lie on the couch all miserable and whine for Ro to make me drinks and food or another pillow or to find the remote for me. The best thing I can do is load myself up on pseudoephedrine & codeine until my immune system manages to win the battle.
Ro is a little trooper when she is sick. If she is sick and I am well, then I will fuss over her and nurse her as much as I can. If we are both sick at the same time, she handles it much better than I do.
95% of the time she has brought the germs home from school, so she is starting to feel better by the time I'm starting to feel sick. Also, there is some transformation that germs go through when passing from children to adults that makes them much more virulent in adults. A kiddie cold in an adult is just the WORST.
The last time my SO was sick he lied and said he was fine the whole time. I was out of town, got sick the night I landed, and he came down with it two days later. Clearly, I'd given it to him. But he said "no, no, I'm fine. you must have caught it on the plane after you left." so I wouldn't feel bad.
But, he has a chronic medical condition (epilepsy), so he doesn't like people fawning over him and trying to take care of him, since he's been dealing with people doing that since he was young already.
I'm one of those ignore it and hope it passes sorts. Go to work, all that. I've really got to see a doc, matter of fact. a cold I had a couple weeks ago has passed, but I still have an occasional lingering cough.
Sometimes I want to be held and sometimes I want to be left alone. The day I broke my collarbone was the same day my family found out that my grandmother's lung cancer surgery two years previously hadn't been a success. After I was treated and given a brace, I was put to bed and they all went trooping off to see her.
When I would get sick in the middle of the night, I would always call for my father.
It all depends on the content of the sickishness - head colds and congestion mimic allergies so it's like water off a duck to me. And given how intesely and how often allergies happen, I'm a pretty waterproof fowl. Lung congestion, GI issues, etc. and I'm a giant whinging couch-denizen of pile-o-blanket-land.
The boy is rarely sick but he goes all I-am-fine-why-do-you-ask-excuse-me-while-I-do-something-clearly-sicklike-okay-you-were-saying? You know he's truly badly off when he hints that maybe it might be time to see a doctor, y'know, in a few days.
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