In Sickness And In Health

I’ve only taken one sick day my entire internship and residency, and that was after contracting a stomach bug that made me pass out while assisting in the OR. I remember staring at the open abdomen, the blue sheets going fuzzy as my vision blacked out and my body went into chills and sweats, thinking oh shoot I’m having a vaso-vagal and the next thing waking up on the floor. Luckily I fell away from the sterile field rather than into it. I spent the day on the couch at home downing Gatorade and went back to work the next morning.

I hardly ever get sick, and then I pretend I’m not. This is, of course, part of the Hopkins mantra. Calling in sick is weak. Along with, no one ever eats lunch. As far as I can tell, clinics schedule a fake lunch hour, but overbook so much the rest of the day that in reality no attending actually stops to eat.

But that was before we had a baby. I’ve finally given in to the fact that at daycare, every child has a perpetually runny nose. If I don’t actually see a river of yellow snot running out of both nostrils, it’s because the caregiver just wiped it off a few moments ago. Which means E basically has had one cold after the other for the past five months.

Luckily, for the most part this doesn’t seem to bother her. She likes her snot; in fact, is loath to part with it and absolutely HATES it any time I try to wipe it off her face. Fine, keep your boogers, I tell her. I tell myself she will be armed like a veteran against all those elementary-school bugs, unlike the other naïve kindergarteners who spent their preschool years cooped up at home.

But sometimes it gets to her. She’s had fevers and been on antibiotics twice. Both times D and I got sick too; between the hospitals where we work and daycare, it’s hard to know what starts what, but the bottom line is that we’re all miserable. None of us are sleeping; all of us are hacking up gunk and losing our appetites. Our house is a wasteland littered with cough-drop wrappers, used tissues, Tylenol bottles and Lysol wipes.

It’s hard being sick. All the tensions inherent in our lifestyles become obvious when she has to stay out of daycare, and we try to get off work or find sitters at the last minute. D has had to work a number of overnight shifts while sick, which sets him back from recovering. And it’s hard being married to someone who’s sick, hard to be loving when you feel about as good as a dung beetle and the other person doesn’t seem so appealing either.

I think sometimes God gives us sickness to humble us. To make us slow down, stop. To help us understand how our patients feel, even when the disease is trivial. When our spouses get sick, to remind us what it means to love and serve someone the way we promised to do. When our children get sick, to understand the pain that God feels when he sees his children suffer. We are forced to confront our selfishness towards our spouse; forced to yield our children again to God’s care. Sometimes we learn to develop healthier habits for our own bodies. I’m learning this can all be what it means to be with God, and with each other, in sickness and in health.