Love Sick

I rarely get sick.  Always been that way, thank God.  I'm good for the occasion head cold, maybe once every two or three years.  I've had the flu a small handful of times in my life.  It must be good genetics, because Lord knows I don't take care of myself too well lately.

In the past few days, I've felt a little "off."  I feel a little chilly, my skin feels weird, I have headaches that come and go, my eyes sometimes hurt when I look from side to side, I have some aches in my neck and lower back, blah, blah, blah.  When I got home from work last night, I took my temperature, and it read just about 100 degrees (at this time I also re-lived the hundreds of temperature-taking moments with Mike, waiting with pounding hearts for those four quick thermometer beeps to see if he had a fever).  I didn't do my usual late-night puttering, but rather went right into bed, where I watched TV and tried to keep warm until I drifted off to sleep a couple hours later.  I didn't sleep well, waking up often with mild chills and sweating.  When I woke up at 10AM, my fever -- which I evidently sweated out -- had broken.  Though very tired, I felt a bit better, so I went to work.

Tonight, it began again, though milder.  My fever tonight is a gentler 99 degrees, but the funny feelings and aches are still there.  I chalk it up to a mild virus, but blabbering on and on about my symptoms aren't the point.  My experience with sickness, mild or severe, has always included one major player -- someone who loves you to care for you.  I'm by no means a needy person.  In fact I can be fiercely independent and stubborn (Mike could tell many stories about that....).  But I will admit one thing:  When you're not feeling well, what you want most, aside from feeling better, is for someone to take care of you.  Once again, I am experiencing another little death to accompany the big death.  I know that if Mike were here, he'd be cuddling me, bringing me soup or water, giving me Tylenol, or just fussing over me because he cared.  In the eight-and-a-half-years of Mike's on-and-off illness, I gladly and fiercely took care of his every need.  It's what I lived for.  Doing for him is what gave me purpose, and I lived for the day when all that effort (chiefly his) would pay off in his good health and healing.  Instead, I'm left with no one to care for, and no one to care for me.  It's a two-way emptiness, felt with new rawness on nights like these.

With naked honesty, I have to ask:  Who will ever take care of me -- in sickness AND in health -- the way Mike would?  Though rhetorical, I will nonetheless answer that question......

No one.