What? Me? I'm fine!!

I woke up with some sort of cold Thursday morning. I so rarely get colds, they always freak me out. It's like I have a giant spider leg growing out of my elbow and I'm trying to figure it out. Like today I was thinking about how my head felt and I realized it was like after a crying jag, like how my head felt after my Dad died and I cried all the time. Another thing I like to do if something's wrong with me is rate myself. 100% is when you feel normal. I'd put this at 70% which isn't really that bad. I mean after my car accident I would have put myself at 5%; after my C-section 25%. That weird pain I get in my left thumb only drops me about 4 percentage points.

Growing up, getting sick or injured was seriously frowned upon. My brother has still not gotten over his "poor treatment" from 30 years ago when he had mono. I just accepted it. I usually kept things to myself, but some things spoke for themselves, like when I'd get strep and all I could do was croak. Then Mom would take me to the doctor and admonish me for not mentioning my throat was sore. It was a Catch 22. Once when I was about 9, I finally mentioned my "stomach ache" that I'd had for about a week and Mom was horrified at the doctor's office when he asked when was the last time I had "used the bathroom," and I think I said, "About a week ago." I still don't like the taste of prunes.

It's took me years to learn sympathy for sick people (and I don't mean people with diseases or terminal illnesses. I mean colds and stomach aches and headaches). It was just something that was missing from my childhood. I guess I learned about the crackers, chicken soup and all that from watching TV. Well, and from my first husband. He came from a family that went out of their way to cater to a sick person. The first time I got sick, and he was doing all that stuff, kinda freaked me out. Also my Dad always said that headaches and back aches were all in people's minds. And my Mom insisted that migraines were something for people like my aunt to use to get out of helping with the dishes after Thanksgiving. Not a sympathetic lot.

My dad broke his arm at work one night when I was around 11. He continued to work for two more hours, but he was turning all shades of colors and freaking out his co-workers. He didn't want to go to the emergency room so he came home to wait for office hours for his doctor. That's how we do things.

In February of 2000 I broke the far right bone in my right foot. The one sort of in the middle of the foot leading to the pinky. I had fallen asleep crossways on a big easy chair, with my legs dangling over the side. I woke up, saw it was just after 11:00 am and thought, "Oh, my soap has started!" I leapt out of the chair and my sound asleep foot just flopped over forward catching all my weight. Without missing a beat, I crawled over to the TV to turn it on. Then I pulled myself up and hopped into the kitchen to make a sandwich. I hopped back to the couch to eat my lunch and watch the soap. It was only when I got up again and broke into a sweat and started seeing stars that I called my Sweetie. About a week or so later I went to Vegas by myself. They really take care of you in the airports when you are injured - an airport employee whisks you around in a wheelchair. The hotel gave me a wheelchair which was nice because the crutches were starting to kill me. A security guy would wheel me from my room to the casino and back. And they gave me a shower chair. I got a little spoiled because when I got back home, no wheelchair. I missed it.

Anyway, the broken foot incident was the first time I ever decided to ask for help. You know, I'd not been raised that way. Well, my Sweetie and I really bonded somehow over that and later, in the fall, he asked me to marry him (we had been together 5 years at that point). So I guess, sometimes, it can be a good thing to ask for help.