I am all astonishment at the number of people I encounter who, upon getting a bit feverish, perhaps achy, definitely not feeling well, apparently go to the doctor and take tests, including a Covid test. Often they then say it was all inconclusive, but I am left here wondering why they do it in the first place, what it accomplishes, and what they would do if the Covid test was positive. Most of these people are already working from home or set up to do so. What on earth are they dragging themselves out of bed to go to the doctor for? Why are they spreading their germs all over?
It’s so ironic, because the “Pandemic” made us extremely germaphobic, to the point of hypochondria, as I wrote a while back, but also impervious to the common sense of just going to bed.
How we feel about getting sick is dependent on a lot of factors. If a person has to go to work no matter what, even the thought of getting sick is panic-inducing. If a person has no one to take care of him, the flu is sad.
I wrote about how to take care of sick children at home on my other blog. The good thing about structuring the family so that the mother isn’t beholden to an outside entity (AKA stays home with the kids) is that the people in the family can get sick and she will take care of them… until, of course, she gets sick herself, and then they muddle through, following her example of care (and most likely her thoughtful preparation such as meals in the freezer); if she’s lucky, her own mother or other relative steps in.
People can denigrate the nuclear family all they want (David Brooks writing in The Atlantic comes to mind, and of course his take is so edgy, with all the sparkly glibness of pompous elite pseudo-social-science, especially if you ignore his investment in the theory, as a man who divorced his wife of 27 years, leaving his family for his much younger research assistant).
Yet when something goes wrong on a scale from annoying to borderline devastating, it’s a pretty handy institution to have around. Yes, obviously, we would all love a village or at least a bit of extended family. Does that require us to scoff at the triad of mother-father-children, bound by marriage, love, and caring?
Who else will take care of things, if not one’s mother and father? My post was an attempt to recover some lost memories of strategies that stood the test of time for many generations, including how to separate the sheep (truly ailing) from the goats (work avoiding/constipated/in need of a short rest). The wisdom grows and gets handed down, until it doesn’t.
The impetus for my writing about it was watching yet another young mom look helplessly at a child crumpled on the floor. To me, it was obvious the poor kid just couldn’t handle life anymore — he felt the way you, in fact, feel when in the impending grip of la grippe. Yet, the mother had no idea what to do, and she is an emblem of her generation. Often, she’s panicky because she thinks her plans are about to be derailed (and she’s right, so might as well meet the situation with grace and competence, I say).
In fact, the Fear of Missing Out drives a lot of resistance to the idea of a mother taking care of her own sick child. There is a big swath of the population that truly doesn’t know what to do and I’m not likely to be able to help them, as they are inured to government dependence. Then there is the other big contingent of hyper-scheduled moms who think that missing a birthday party is a calamity. “She was throwing up this morning but now she’s better, so we thought we’d come!” (A real-life example, enough to strike fear in everyone’s heart!).
But right now, my attention is on adults, usually women I think, who seem to have lost the ability to get sick without tests! Post-Covid-restriction-time (which I refer to as Lockdown, to keep things tethered to reality), seems to have instilled the idea that a “health care professional” must be consulted for everything.
This is not a good idea.
Learn how to be a bit sick. Stay out of urgent care. Treat yourself like one of the children in my post. Lie down with a some drinks nearby. Rest. What’s interesting is how in the midst of an unproductive interlude like a cold or the flu, one can enjoy things, at least in the recovery phase, that one normally doesn’t have time to enjoy. Those novels one was thinking of reading come to mind.
I was searching for C. S. Lewis’s comments in his letters about his lack of aversion to falling ill; he was so busy and had so many responsibilities that he saw it as a blessed reprieve and wrote about its pleasures often.
“Seriously, unless it is [a] very painful or oppressive illness I always get some pleasure out of ‘keeping my bed’. Especially if you are sick enough to have a fire! There is something beautifully cosy about meals brought up on a tray, and after a frugal but thoroughly enjoyable breakfast I love to pile up my pillows, call for a choice pile of bright volumes and settle down to an endless read: if there be snow falling so much the better. I say ‘bright volumes’ advisedly, because all books are not suitable for bed reading.”
If it were me, I’d take some hydroxychloroquine (did you know the study that “showed” the dangers of that incredibly safe and helpful substance was retracted?). And elderberry cordial. And zinc. I’d pull a Jane Austen out of the shelf, or perhaps a volume of Beverley Nichols’s garden stories if I felt unequal to too much concentration. And I wouldn’t worry, because most things people come down with don’t need to be named and will be over in a few days.
This is always the answer when a friend says "should I take my child to the pediatrician?" Well, what are you hoping the pediatrician will do? Is it plausibly the sort of thing an antibiotic will help with, or are you going to be told "it's probably viral, get lots of rest and lots of fluid"? Because I can tell you that without you needing to get in the car!
I had a friend ask me if I thought it would be irresponsible to watch her child at home and not take them to the doctor. I was a little flummoxed, because 9/10 times there’s nothing the doctor can do. It can be helpful to have a diagnosis when you’ve got a baby and you can’t tell if their ears are infected, but still, even with that the newer studies show that expectant management is reasonable in most cases (and I want to get an otoscope so I can just look). I do think parents feel ill equipped to handle illness, and don’t understand that fevers are not usually in themselves dangerous. We have just lost all our common sense. I’ve observed in myself that while I’m not anxious about getting sick, it’s been very hard to deal with my increased anxiety around getting other people sick. I finally had to put my foot down with myself and draw some lines — if someone is vomiting, obviously ill, or has a fever, we of course stay home. If they have a runny nose and are tearing around the house we’re probably just going to proceed as normal, because with 7 people *someone* is always sniffling. But Covid really altered my gauge and I’m still trying to get back to a normal understanding of illness (of course, I don’t think it helps that we’ve had such bad years of illness because everyone is playing catch up!)