On Death's Doorstep

I picked up some kind of bug this week.  I didn't do it on purpose and I'm an unwilling, hostile, adversarial host to this intruder.  Strangely enough, I have to battle the urge to say: "This is a waste of my time."  I want to get out of this vale of tears without ever getting sick ever again.  I would prefer that pain and suffering be optional, and I would opt the hell out.  I can't shake the absurd feeling that I've failed somehow when I get sick, that if I had taken the right course of action I could have avoided all of the unpleasantness entirely.  I did something wrong.  I should have done something better.  I get depressed when I get sick.  Catching a cold is not a moral failure.  It is not a character defect.

Whenever several trillion of these little bastards take up residence in me they invariably ride some kind of express train to my lungs.  It may have something to do with the fact that I smoked enough weed to carpet a two lane highway from Waukesha to Menominee Falls.  For the record I have no idea how far that is - those are just funny sounding words.  So I get the death cough - a ticklish, unproductive wheezing.  The problem is that it keeps me awake.  I don't feel that bad but I cough myself awake every time I try to fall asleep.  I'm on like no sleep.  I'm a jerk when I'm well rested so you can imagine how I'm behaving right now.

When I was in college I took microbiology.  I remember almost nothing about the class except for this one experiment we did.  Everyone was given several petri dishes full of agar - a food source for microorganisms - and a packet of Q-Tips.  We walked around and touched various surfaces with a QT and then inoculated the agar with whatever crap we had picked up.  I remember swabbing door knobs and handles on drinking fountains and the like.  Holy shit, those dishes exploded with mycobacterial growth.  It was a slaughter.  I have no idea how any of us make it through any day without contracting several fatal diseases.  It must be total armageddon going on inside my body all of the time.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to die from this one.

Am I on my death bed?  No, I'm on my regular bed.