Could you be a little less specific?
I am sick with something. Who knows what? It doesn’t really matter what you call it: flu, cold, virus. I don’t want to talk about it. I hate it when people drone on about commonplace illnesses that we all get every year. The world breaks down in two camps when it comes to the winter blahs: those who go home, crawl in bed and wait it out in noble silence and those who drag their carcass out in public, cough in your face, and tell you how miserable they are – complete with timelines, sputum color charts, fever statistics and short pauses in which you are meant to comment (come on, say it with me: oh, you poor thing!).
Why is it that we never hear about people’s embarrassing little infirmities? That nagging hemorrhoid that makes you wince every time you sit down. The fungus on your big toe that glows orange under an ultraviolet lamp. The rash on your back that is starting to look like the map of Italy. You might just grab my attention if you divulge a medical condition along these lines: “I’ve got these two warts that popped up on my breast, you know, like right on my tattoo of Jerry Garcia. Kinda looks like he’s got fangs now.” Nobody talks about that stuff, just their colds.
Just for grins, here are the top five noteworthy things that I’ve been afflicted with:
- Poison Ivy on my balls and anus. It hurt like crazy. For weeks. And you can’t not itch. After a while I just didn’t care. “Yeah, I’m scratching my ass, so what?”
- Dog bite on my balls. It also hurt like crazy. The dog, a miserable little terrier called Duffy, bit everyone in my childhood home; he did not discriminate. How did he get me in that most sensitive spot you might ask? I was sitting on the floor and Duffy was between my legs chewing on a toy ball when he suddenly had the urge for something, shall we say, meatier? He was later given away to a farmer, who shot him for killing one of his chickens.
- Amoebic dysentery from a trip to a border town in Mexico. The source: ice chips in a margarita. Damn, that margarita was good, too! Possibly the sickest I’ve ever been. You don’t want to know the details.
- Sun poisoning. Spring break, sophomore year in college. We rented an RV, drove 1,000 miles non-stop to southern Florida and immediately hit the beach. Exhausted, I fell asleep in the sun and woke up four hours later with second-degree blistering burns on my skin. Needless to say, no “Wild On South Beach” for me after that.
- Foot cramps. New Zealand. After 27 hours of constant travel I finally got to my hotel and tried to sleep, only I couldn’t because every five minutes my left foot cramped up and I had to jump out of bed and hop around the room until it went away. Ultimately, I discovered that if I slept with shoes on, it didn’t happen. But not just any shoe worked. It had to be my hiking boots. Slept five nights in a row in New Zealand in hiking boots.
5:09:08 PM 
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