Watching Sitcoms

I’ve been sick. For a really, really long time now and it just sucks. Plus, I lost my job. Well, see, it was like this. It’s like I read once somewhere. I think it was Shirley Jackson, or maybe it was Erma Bombeck, one of them anyway, who wrote about how whenever anyone else in her home was sick, like her husband or one of her kids, it was like the end of the world. They got to be as sick as they wanted and she had to take care of them. But when she got sick, she just had to keep going and no one noticed. She said she used to fantasize that the doctor would stop in for some reason, take one look at her and say she was so sick she should be in the hospital and how dare they not take care of her. That kind of thing.

That’s what its been like for me. I knew I hadn’t been feeling well for a long time, months. Maybe longer. My neck was killing me and I’d lost my voice. Even before my mom had surgery and I’d spent the entire month of October being a nursemaid, while trying to do all the other stuff I needed to do, which included my very full-time job and teach our choir’s sopranos to sing a dozen Christmas songs, I wasn’t well. Going into November, I was exhausted. I kept trying to get a day off to rest, but it wasn’t happening. I asked to take off the week of Thanksgiving, just to have “me” day, but it was a no. I had, I think, something like 17 people here for dinner on Thanksgiving, so I asked if I could take off just Tuesday and Wednesday to get ready. Tuesday was a no. So I took off just Wednesday and spent the entire day running at full-tilt to get everything ready. It was actually on that Tuesday, November 20, that I started to lose my voice. But I just kept going. All though the crazy holidays.

But when I finally gave in and went to see the doctor in late January, it turns out I was actually sick. Apparently, parts of my neck are fused together. Also, that little nagging laryngitis issue I had had for over 10 weeks? Turns out I had a hemorrhage on my left vocal cord. So I had to go through voice therapy and the doctor put me on disability cause he didn’t think it was a good thing for me to talk too much. My job is all talking. I actually had to stop talking for like five full days at first. Completely. It was very hard.

I loved my job. But, honestly, I don’t think my boss believed I had to be off work, cause she knows how much I wanted to take off and she wouldn’t let me, for months, and she probably felt guilty and mad all at the same time. So when the doctor finally released me to go back to work in April, my boss was real strange about it, like she didn’t know what I was going to do. I found out later, that she had already given my desk away to someone else. She had locked me out of my email a while before that, and I started to worry then, but I still thought I’d have a job when I got better.

Well, I found another position, but only part-time, which was what the doctor recommended for the first little while. I was supposed to start this week.

Guess what? I’m sick again. This time I have a bacterial infection of some sort, all over my face. At first I thought it was shingles, and I had to go to the Emergency Clinic cause my doctor’s office was closed. They told me it was a sinus infection and a staph infection, and put me on an antibiotic. I was on it for about five days when I could get in to see my own doctor. My doctor said it was some sort of bacterial infection, but wasn’t sure what exactly. He sent me for some blood work and put me on another antibiotic. Now, I’m completely nauseous all the time, as well as being all itchy and red and swollen in the face. I’m absolutely miserable. And I’ve been sitting around off work for nearly 4 months now.

You’d think with all this free time I’d have been able to watch more sitcoms. But it just hasn’t happened.