Flu? Me, too

Flu season is the worst. Every time you blow your nose or cough a bit into your fist, somebody asks, “Did you get a flu shot yet?” No, of course I didn’t get a flu shot. That would require me to be smarter than a flu virus, and if I were smarter than a flu virus, I wouldn’t be standing here coughing into my fist.

I’m a total wuss when it comes to flus. Or rather, my body is a total wuss. My wife’s immune system is way more resilient than mine. She’ll catch the tail-end of my lingering cold, start feeling woozy for a day or so while I’m regaining strength, and still recover and be up Facebooking before I’m back on my feet.

I, on the other hand, fall with the slightest push whenever a flu virus passes through the neighborhood. If a flu came through the Internet, I’d catch it. And it just stays in my body for weeks sometimes, doing a little Geronimo victory dance around my corpuscles, shooting the rapids in my bloodstream while I lay prone and helpless.

If there were ever a deadly worldwide contagion, like in those movies, I’d be the first to go. I’d be Gwyneth Paltrow, all dewy with sweat, convulsing, blood squirting out of my eyes and nose, dead within 15 minutes. My wife would be leaning over in bed, mildly concerned, holding an open copy of Vogue.

Then again, my wife doesn’t self-medicate as ruthlessly as I do. I’m all about science and technology when it comes to fighting simple colds. I’m like Colonel Kurtz: “Exterminate the brutes!” It’s like my immune system is held together with smears of Tusserin and Virlix and Bioflu. No wonder it blows away so quickly when the Big Bad Flu shows up and huffs and puffs.

Flu season is probably one of the most social seasons of the year, though. It’s when you catch yourself sniffling, look up, notice all your office mates are sniffing too, and feel somehow comforted. Or you see complete strangers sniffling or coughing, and give a little nod of recognition: Yeah, me too. It’s not like you’re going to hug those strangers, but you know you’re in the same club.

You know you’ve got it bad when you have to go to work, and you start assembling your Mobile Flu Kit. For me, that’s a pack of Kleenex, a Seratide inhaler, some Drixine, and a bunch of antibiotics (I save those for last — like when the flu is hanging around forever, and you feel like napalming the mo-fo to death. Or like those espionage movies where the spy is told to chomp down on a cyanide tablet if captured. If worse comes to worst, I’m glad those antibiotics are within reach.) So I’ll tote this stuff around, and it clearly marks me as a flu victim. Sometimes you can milk it for sympathy and reduced workload.

But my wife advises me to try more homeopathic methods. She believes in healing the body through prayer, and I kind of do, too. I’m seen it work, so I’m no longer allowed to be completely skeptical. She tells me to greet each day by declaring my gratitude for health and other things that makes life great. This “attitude of gratitude” should start somewhere in my toes, then move to my feet and legs, and work its way up through my various extremities. (Don’t leave any out; you should declare that you’re grateful for each of your senses, your internal organs, even the more useless body parts like the bellybutton and the uvula.)

This prayer of gratitude actually does remind me of how much I miss being healthy. Isn’t it the case when you’re sick that you always lie around, thinking of what you’d surely be doing instead if you were feeling better? So somehow the gratitude thing has recuperative powers, if only by visualizing what our perfectly healthy body will be like, which the body then mimics. And it definitely makes you stop taking your health for granted.

So I fight the flu on several battlefronts now. It still may take me six or seven days to get over every passing bug, and I can’t say I’ve chucked out all my medicines, but I’m also open to other avenues of recovery. I hope this will spur my immune system to become more of a fighter. (Probably, too, I should stop writing articles that encourage viruses to land on me.)

So for now, praise the lord. And pass the antibiotics.