Under-The-Weather-Ness

Teaching is a great job. Politics and the like relating to it tend to swing back and forth, but the actual teaching profession is phenomenal to behold. I love it. Except that I work in a germ factory. Teaching miniature germ factories. By the time you've been around teaching a few years, your immune system is made entirely out of steel. It has to be. Otherwise you’d never be able to leave your bed and actually get to work. I've had kids throw up on my shoes, cough in my mouth (even more gross than it sounds), and leave their used tissues on tables, long forgotten. All of this and your body learns to rebuild itself, similar to a superhero mutation but maybe not quite.  My point: if a teacher is sick, then they are SICK.

I don’t know about you, but as long as I’m healthy, I sort of forget what being sick is like. There’s a level of disconnect between my sympathy for someone else and actually recalling the feelings and exhaustion that go along with being sick. It’s a mental version of: I just heard you cough, so I back up a foot. I don’t even want to remember what it’s like to be sick. At all.

Now though, I remember. As I sit, hunched over my computer, my eyes squinting and my pajamas mismatched, I remember everything. It totally and completely sucks.

Temperature is a tricky bastard when you’re sick. It can be this way even if you’re not, but when you are it is multiplied by about 6000. Too hot, too cold, too anything. Never a comfortable resting state. And the rest! If you’re lucky enough to be able to sleep, (which I am because it’s the weekend), your bed becomes both friend and enemy. I love my bed. Post alarm clock me is IN love with my bed. But when you have to be in it, deemed unfit for life activities, even I begin to resent it a little bit. Spreading the time between bed and couch helps, but honestly the couch is just the living room version of a bed and everyone knows it.

Now that I’m sick, I’m home. Which, in the craziness of scheduling, I feel like I haven’t really been here a whole lot lately. And now that I’m here, without a lot to distract me, I’m noticing things. Laundry piled up, dishes in the sink, paper piles that have sprouted up organically throughout my shelving. Things that need doing, only I’m too exhausted to do them. How can I possibly take care of household chores, when the very idea of making soup stretches before me in endless steps. Walking to the kitchen, opening the cupboard, finding soup, closing the cupboard, finding a can opener, and on and on and on. All this for soup. Dumb soup that I don’t even think I want anymore. In fact, am I hungry at all? Nope. Finally a diet that might work.

Being sick comes with a time limit. I feel like it is truer now than it has ever been before. People work a LOT. They cram their days with a million things that they feel like only they can do, and there simply isn't time to deal with all this under-the-weather-ness. I will tell you though, that if you have the kind of job that you can call in sick to, and have that be it, you’re incredibly lucky. If a teacher gets sick, if a rogue virus infiltrates their impermeable immune system, they are screwed. Because when you call in, you need to have sub plans that go along with that call.

Papers outlining schedules and directions, rules, classroom outlines, kids who are able to help if needed, what books to read, where to find that thing that you could find within seconds, but someone who has no knowledge of your classroom could take months to find. It’s like leading someone around in a dark room. From a letter. Oh and there are a thousand kids in the room. And some of them cough in your face. Good luck. My point is that I need to be better by Monday. Especially considering it’s Valentine’s week, and also, Teacher Appreciation week at my school. There’s no way a sub gets to come in for that. I’ll crawl in if I have to…which I might.

This post is whiny. I get that. But I’m sick. And home alone. And soup is really far away. And my bed is gloating. And my laundry resembles Mt. Everest. Plus it’s Friday, which should have a rule against anyone being sick on this day anyway, just on principle. So be nice to me. When other people claim illness, I do the standard ‘get well soon’ statement, the ‘so-sorry-it’s-you-but-glad-it’s-not-me’ face, and really do try and make things as comfortable as possible; all by staying a healthy two feet away from them of course. That’s all I ask. And also, if I could just get some soup? 

My progress thus far. Also, does anyone know what that spoon holder thingy in the background is actually called? I ended up calling mine Rico, but it doesn't quite feel right.