It’s Friday. Friday: the bacon-flavored nugget at the end of a week of pure obedience, the giant reward, the sigh of relief. The show, my friends, is at its end for this run. At least that’s what it is supposed to be. Not for me this week. I've been home sick.
A Brief History of Faking It
When I was young, I remember staying home sick as the height of all reprieves from schoolwork, and mean little girls who would pass their secrets to everyone at the table but me. In a tiny one and a half bedroom apartment where five people dwelt, it was paradise to be home sick. Think Home Alone. I could finally live my dream of eating nothing but ramen noodles and watch daytime television. Maybe I’d go to the pool or start a new project (even then I loved projects). Days home sick were the greatest unless you were actually sick, of course.
Like all kids, I bent my acting skills to the limit and as a sibling in a brood of three others, you had to be talented to warrant a day off from my parents. Some nights I’d skip dinner so I could use that evidence as support for my case the next morning. Sometimes I’d even go to sleep super early in order to give the appearance that I’d caught a bug that day and it was going to lay me out for AT LEAST 24 hours. I never went to far as to put the thermometer under the light bulb like the kid in E.T., but it was only because I didn’t think a temperature of 135 degrees would render good results. I think that even Ferris Bueller warns against this method citing that a trip to the ER is never a desired outcome.
But, by far, my most elaborate plan for staying home was also my biggest fail. If you ask my sister, she’ll peel over in laughter to this very day and will probably utter the phrase “whole peanuts” in between exaggerated breathes for air. I used to wish I was an only child. One night I decided I could not possibly face the teacher without my homework or deal with the mini-bitches I shared a table with (I take the Lord of the Flies stance on children and innocence). I had to do something drastic. Mom was not buying the traditional pouty face and refusal to get out of bed. So, I went into the bathroom with some, what I thought were, very well-planned ingredients. I think I had a mustard packet and some peanuts. I opened the packet of mustard and peanuts and started mashing them into the tile of the bathroom floor. The result was a bile-colored pile with whole peanuts in it. It needed more orange, I thought. What was orange? Ah, the conditioner that we used at the time was orange and it smelled like heaven. I added it to my fabulous concoction. A few sound effects later and I emerge with the frown, the fake shivers and a half-bent posture to indicate my severe agony. My sister finds me three steps out of the bathroom.
“Oh, I’m so sick” I tell her. She, being the foil of my entire childhood, replies.
“Oh? Did you puke?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see!!”
I point a frail and slightly trembling finger toward the bathroom floor.
“It smells incredible in here for puke,” she starts, “Oh and what is this? Wow. Whole peanuts! Whole peanuts! You barfed up whole peanuts.”
If I thought I wouldn’t be struck dead by lightning for cursing at that age, I would have had a steady stream of F-bombs going off in my head. They’d never buy it now. I didn’t even have to worry about alerting them either because in her torrent of laughter, my sister belted out for the authorities to come and inspect my latest creation.
“Mom! Mom! Get in here now! Ann’s sick. Look. She’s been barfing up whole peanuts and shampoo.”
The State of Staying Home as an Adult
Nothing could be farther from paradise than staying home sick as adult. For the most part, anything that will warrant more work upon your return or will leave you unable to get essential tasks completed is not dubbed desirable. To add to it, staying home from work is a last resort, meaning you feel so completely mutilated that even sitting up straight for an extended period of time warrants short breathes and a vague prayer for a quick death. Oh, and the hit to the wallet only amplifies those prayers.
Weird Al has a song where he celebrates calling in sick to do absolutely nothing all day. Doing absolutely nothing all day will do to an active mind what the rack did to medieval criminals. It pulls at little doubts you couldn’t afford to entertain in a busy atmosphere; it stabs at tender wounds you never got a chance to lick; and it holds you back from doing anything about them.
And then there are the drugs. When I first got sick, I was looking forward to the days of Nyquil and the nights of Theraflu. This is the closest I can actually get to narcotics in my life, so I welcome those “drowsy syrups”. The doctor put the prescriptions in my hands and told me that my bronchitis would be gone in a few days after starting this inhaler, and to make sure I kept up with the decongestants. Yay. Decongestants mean sleep and fevered dreaming.
Not always, apparently. Imagine my disappointment as I lay in my bed at midnight, the covers to my chin, an idiotic grin pasted across my face and my foot twitching nervously at the end of the bed. The dialogue in my brain was just one long word. okIhavetogotosleepforworktomorrowiamfeelingbetteryay. Inhalers, for those of you who don’t know, puff a small cloud of crack into your lungs. Instant absorption. It’s like shooting a Monster into your heart. Logically, I figured that I could negate these effects with some decongestant magic. Some of you may already be chuckling because you know exactly how decongestants act in certain situations. Like, for instance, if you mix them with a strong upper, they will only heighten the 100-cups-of-coffee reality you are stuck in. One a.m. comes around and cleaning seems like the most perfectly logical cure for all of this. Cleaning ends at five and the sun is coming up and since you’d deprived your body of sleep and replaced its healing time with lemon-scented household cleaners, you are sicker than when you started. Grand. More days home. I don’t know about you, but when I go to sleep when I am sick, I have a slight fear of waking up.
It’s always worse when you wake up.
