I haven’t been able to catch a fucking break this month. It started with my tailbone at the beginning of October, where I am sure I bruised it. It finally healed, but then it was my leg, which, due to the tailbone, was pulled during a mountain biking ride. Meanwhile, my tooth was aching, which was nothing but $119 down the drain. Then, on Monday of last week, my right eye started hurting like an eyelash needed to be pulled out. I didn’t think anything of it until later that night. It was still hurting, and my roommate suggested it was a sty. The next morning, my eye was glued shut from mucus. I was worried but could not see a doctor until the next day. Well, after waiting 20 minutes and having the doctor come in and know immediately what it was, I left with a good ole case of pink eye. How I got it, I have no clue. We think it was the bowling alley. I think it was a big box store I went to. Either way, it was not fun to have. I thought the pink eye was a thing that only little kids got. It spreads quicker around them, that’s for sure. But nope, any age can catch it. So, for about a week, I was enemy No. 1. What’s up with me now? Oh, just a sore throat and a cough.
Now, ’tis the season of spreading wonderful diseases. Halloweekend is the perfect petri dish for cultivating cultures of variating contaminants. Around this time last year, it was frat flu, regular flu, COVID-19, scabies apparently, chlamydia, which does its rounds every year, and Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. Hand, Foot and Mouth disease is just bewildering to me. It spread around the faculty for a bit, and now it’s gotten to the student body. One of my classmates came back from being a week absent and was a casualty, like, yeah, I was battling HF&M. The disease used to be more common in little kids, but now it’s become more common in adults. I was discussing with a coworker of mine who is a nurse, and she called it the new chicken pox, which I can see since you don’t really hear about kids having chicken pox parties anymore. That’s the beauty of vaccination.
No matter how hard we try, disease, illness, and injury are something we must live within our day-to-day lives. Some are worse than others. In the end, we all go through it, and it is something that should bring us together rather than push us apart. Yes, who wants to get sick? No one. But the feeling of having someone be there for you when you are sick is one of the best feelings in the world. You know you would do the same. That’s one of the things that upset me about the pandemic: it separated people mentally. Physical separation is different. It’s when you consider people to be the enemy, people of the same community, to be the enemy that’s when problems arise. If it’s not race, gender, or class, it’s a disease that is the equalizer and the separator. When you are taught to be kind to one another and to wash your hands but decide to cough in someone’s face because they’re not wearing a mask to teach them a lesson, there’s something fucked behind that. When the illness passes, that memory remains, and that person who wanted to teach a lesson is left isolated. That’s how they wanted to be anyway, so let them be isolated even if they want to rejoin society. You did your time fighting that sickness, just like everyone else who now has immunity. Now, it’s no longer your choice whether or not you are to rejoin the community.
What do I know? It’s just an opinion that’ll be torn to pieces because it might be the wrong one. Opinions never hurt anyone. I’m not acting on my opinion. Once it becomes an action, it becomes an issue. These are just the observations that I’ve made, having done my time catching colds and breaking my bones.
I’m all cured of my pink eye. It didn’t spread to anyone, and I was extremely cautious of that. Colds spread. That’s just life. It went around my roommates before it got to me. Illness tells you it’s time to slow down, take a well-deserved break, and take time for yourself. I just hope that my cold is at the tail end of the month I’ve had. I’d like to get back to exercising again. I’d like to be reintroduced to my community again.
