Humor in Anything
Sometimes our life situations are simply horrible - it helps to find the humor in any situation.
I'm going to share the last few weeks of my life with you. I'll start out, for those who don't know me, by saying that I am stubborn, and I hate missing work, and I hate going to the doctor. Not only because I get a $500 bonus for each semester I don't miss, but because it is much more work for me to be gone than it is for me to be there. Ahh, the life of a teacher!
Anyway, three weeks ago, I contracted Strep Throat. I have never had it before, so it didn't dawn on me what it was that I had. I called in sick to work (which I hate to do), and then laid in bed, alternating between freezing cold and burning hot all morning long. I felt utterly miserable, and so my husband sent me to the doctor after he saw me at lunch. He demanded it, and even though I pointed out that if the situation were reversed he would refuse to go, he told me I had no choice. I was going, or being dragged. So I went - grumpily, but I went. I had a lovely temperature of 102 degrees, and it probably fluxuated up to 104 or so during the time I'd been laying in bed.
So I got the orders to stay home for another day, and some prescriptions to ward off the infection and general ickiness - lots of ickiness. All was fine for about a week and a half, and then I went on with life as usual.
Then I got red splotches all over my body - it started with my hands, which ached pretty badly, and spread to my stomach, legs, and arms. I thought they were hives, so I figured no biggie, I'll take some allergy medication, and they'll go away. I get hives relatively often over little things, so it was something I'd dealt with in the past.
They didn't go away. In fact, they simply continued to get worse, and then my hands and knees were so swollen that it hurt immensely to move them.
I barely got any sleep that night, and then I parked myself outside the clinic in the morning 10 minutes before it opened. I actually stood in the freezing cold, but that was because my knees hurt too badly for me to walk back to the car. They nearly took me to the emergency room, but since my throat wasn't closing up, they went ahead and set me as the first patient the doctor should see after getting me in the door.
I had contracted something called Erythema Multiforme - a hypersensitive allergic reaction to the penicillin they'd given me to treat the Strep Throat. Great! It has a few different kind of lesions involved with this illness, along with swollen joints (and the pain that goes with it) and other body parts, general ickiness feelings, and randomly swollen parts of my face. I got the bad news that I'd be out for an entire week of school, maybe two, as we treated THIS situation. All they could do was treat it and let it run its course.
Here are my symptoms by day:
Monday - swollen knees, swollen hands, swollen eyelids, lesions all over
Tuesday - swollen top lip, swollen right eye, lesions all over
Wednesday - swollen bottom lip, lesions all over, but starting to improve
... by this point, some people were taking bets on what part of my face would swell next. Every day it was something different! The coffee shop owner, that I never see when I'm actually working except for a few times when he's working with my kids at the church, saw me on a nearly daily basis. A trip to the shop for some soup was my "outing" for each day, so I didn't go entirely bonkers inside the house. I gained a new name there... "Lumpy". I'll get him back for that one at some point.
Really, I must have looked like a mess. Had I thought about it at the time, I probably would have photo documented each day. As it was, I kept trucking, I kept a smile, and I kept sending more work for my students to do. I scared a few people by leaving the house and running some errands (the poor people at the bank) - but hey, they needed a reason to feel better about themselves, too, right?
Oh yeah, and even though I itched like mad, I couldn't scratch. At all. Or wear undergarments. Undergarments, or any restrictive/hugging type clothing, would make the lesions spread - or worse, scratch the surface and give me a gooey and pussy secondary surface infection. THAT... is something I didn't want, so it was without undergarments for the week! (It felt surprisingly... free...) I also wore soft clothing.
Thursday - swollen eyelids, swollen hands, swollen left eye, lesions
Friday - some lesions left, NO RANDOMLY SWOLLEN BODY PARTS!
I've never felt so good about looking myself in the mirror before! There was nothing swollen or out of place - I just still had some red blotches. I could deal with that.
Oh yeah, and most everyone I ran into wanted to see the spots. (My worst was over my torso and legs.) I wonder about the morbid fascination, they could have seen the spots on my arms just fine, but nooooo, they wanted to see the ones on my stomach. Granted, they were different KINDS of spots on each place, as I was told by my doctor, thus the term "multiforme". I guess the spots on my stomach were more gross. I got a kick out of the reactions of the people who saw them, though.
Whatever happens, look for the humor in the situation. Imagine putting one of your characters through these sort of symptoms, but having them go about their every day lives anyway. (Have it simply be a severe allergic reaction to something, rather than the hypersensitive reaction mine was - the symptoms without the seriousness.) I had to stay at home because of the steroids and my job (I would have gotten very ill around the kids, and the whole part of the meds knocking me out for a good four to five hours during the day wouldn't have helped), but I can just imagine the humor (or horror!) possible if someone would go about their daily life in a comedy story. The comments, the whispers, the jokes, the giggles, and oh my goodness - the bets! I can imagine a humorous detective trying to grill people, but getting grilled in return about the conditions.
As it was, I already played "find the animal" in my spots - at least, the ones that were not round. (Or goodness, the ones that had grown together.) I think I found a rabbit on a bicycle, and a fluffy teddy bear.
The best part of my week? My doc when I went in for a follow-up on Friday. "Hey, you don't look like you've been paintballed all over the face anymore!" Thanks, Doc. Heh.
I'm still on steroids, and I'm still dealing with some of the symptoms of the allergic reaction (and will for a few more weeks), but hey, I am looking back on last week and just shaking my head and smiling. |
Comedy: February 15, 2012 Issue [#4883]
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