This time it's for real.

A few weeks ago my roommate went home for her grandmother’s funeral and returned with a sickness that has since ravaged her entire family. She got the worst of it, and despite her best efforts to keep our apartment safe and germ-free for my sake it has finally caught me.

It took me a couple days to realize that I was really and truly coming down with something. I started to suspect at the beginning of the week when I found it particularly hard to get up in the mornings, but I’m a bit of a closet hypochondriac and spend an awful lot of time wondering if a tickle in my throat or a sudden tendency to sleep for eight hours instead of seven and a half, or dizziness when I stand up, or any manner of ambiguous symptoms might be connected to some pending malady.

So I told myself I was just fine until Thursday morning when I accompanied another grad student on field visits to secondary ed students out observing in the high schools. I was able to act more or less normally, but my head felt…heavy—I don’t know how else to describe it—and I could think of no alternative explanation. By the end of the day, however, I was doing fine, and I got up yesterday morning and had a very nice run and attended a social event with some of the other grad students last night without feeling overly exhausted or even antisocial, and even though last night I was shivering enough to pile on every blanket I had, slept fitfully, and woke with an uncomfortably sore throat, I still put in a good eight or nine miles this morning, running only a little slower than normal. So it hasn’t knocked me out yet, although I think I might have guaranteed collapse by the end of the day with my decision to run anyway. (Lest you think I am an obsessive runner, I promise you I was feeling just fine other than the sore throat and it seemed a pity to waste a beautiful quiet fall Saturday morning because I thought I might feel bad later on.)

The thing is, I really don’t get sick very often. It used to be about once a year, with some degree of regularity (almost always occurring on or around Thanksgiving). Last year I suffered from more colds than normal so I can no longer claim the once-a-year status. But still, I am almost never knocked down by illness. And when I am sick, I never quite believe I’m all that sick. I think I have a nice immune system (which might be still nicer if I returned to the not-quite-compulsive hand-washing I used to engage in back when I was more germ-conscious), and I rarely feel the need to skip class or take mid-day naps or go to bed early or take medicine, which makes me feel funny. I just go about my daily business, avoid liquids because they make me gag, and look forward to bedtime not so much because I’m tired and achy but because if I’m asleep then I can’t feel any of the mild discomforts of illness. After about 24 hours I’m back to normal except for the addition of a cough and maybe a runny nose.

The symptoms this time seem to be dragging out. My illnesses are surprisingly predictable and the icky-feeling-in-my-throat usually comes within a couple hours of the onset of symptoms—this time it took a couple days. This has me a little worried, wondering if this time will be the exception, if this time I will be knocked flat and fall behind lose the nice routine I’ve been developing since starting out fresh here.

But of course, that’s the hypochondriac in me again. Most likely I will be just fine by tomorrow.