The Sickness Lament
Today my body is a teeming bag of contagion. I can feel my enemies in their multitudes racing through the avenues under my skin, darting between battalions of angry phagocytes, killing cells and regrouping in lymphy cul-de-sacs, doubling and redoubling their numbers every second. It’s just gross. If whatever I’ve got is viral, then its agents are reprogramming my cells and then multiplying inside of them until they bulge like sated ticks and explode, spilling billions of protein-sheathed strands of malevolent RNA into my bloodstream.
It’s a very unsettling feeling, being sick, and more unsettling the more you think about it. If you’re lucky, then your body holds up fairly well in its first couple of decades — brushing aside the lesser invaders with a casual immunological swipe of its hand, quickly and efficiently marshaling its full forces to fight off the really bad stuff — and all the while pumping blood through itself, keeping temperatures where they should be, balancing hormone levels and building synaptic bridges.
So when the body fails — even temporarily — to keep the wolves at bay, it feels like a betrayal. What the hell, body? you say. I was supposed to go work out tonight. I can barely make it up the stairs. And your body, busy raising your temperature to bake its foes to death and deploying masses of screaming antibodies (bouncing toward the enemy like tiny, manic ping pong balls), briefly turns its inner eye on you and says (with its inner mouth): Maybe you should try feeding me some goddam broccoli every so often, you coke-swilling twinky-inhaling reprobate.
And so, utterly chastened, you lie back on the couch, wondering if the left side of your head has actually swollen to be twice the size of the right side, or if it only feels that way, and reach for a Ho Ho. Lots of vitamins in Ho Ho’s, you’ve heard.
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