There's something about being sick that reaches beyond the physically unpleasant... the fatigue, the aches, the coughing. There's something that extends into the emotions, especially if you've been sick for a while... a sense of not-rightness that extends to the bones, hovering about you, akin somehow to paranoia. It's a shadow hanging over you, a feeling that something is looming, unseen... an intimation of great threat.
At least, that's how it is for me.
For a week now I've battled a cough that has settled into me, drawing chest muscles tight, rattling up from my lungs, and an accompanying aching soreness in my throat. No fever, no nausea, minor congestion... "just a cold." It's not a chronic illness, not anything that would hospitalize you, not even akin to Covid. It's just bad enough to keep me up most of the night hacking and wheezing, preventing any semblance of sound sleep - but not bad enough to justify calling in sick to work for four days in a row (which I did anyway).
Given my high blood pressure, I can't take 95% of the over the counter medicines available, and I've gotten quite resentful of the stupid commercials which show people with colds and flus popping pills or guzzling syrups and going happily on about their lives, free from all symptoms. It hasn't worked that way for me, not with the few medicines said to be acceptable for people with high blood pressure.
Commercials minimize cold and flu viruses as minor inconveniences, things easily put off by any sensible person with a life to live - but as a teacher, I guarantee that if you aren't able to sleep through the night because you're wracked with coughing, going into work with a cold is far more than merely inconvenient. Besides the physical issues, you have the fact that kids can smell weakness - you'd do better to wade through piranha-infested waters with a bleeding gash in your leg than try to teach grammar with a cold. At least the meat-eating fish might leave a bit of you intact to clamber out the other side.
Actually, I'm exaggerating mightily. My own students are mostly a kindly lot, and would likely opt not to run rampant... but they also wouldn't accomplish much, not with a muzzy-headed teacher who can't speak more than half a dozen words before dissolving into a coughing fit.
And then there's the looks you get from other teachers... the looks that say, Why are you even here if you're sick? Never mind that you feel guilty calling in for "just a cold;" never mind that calling in sick to teach is more work than actually showing up, because you have to make up lessons that keep the students busy enough not to eat the substitute alive (and that's not an exaggeration, kindly students or not) while trying not to make the lessons too difficult for someone who isn't an actual teacher to teach.
Or not teach. It's a sad fact that most substitutes cannot do any real teaching that will help you keep up with your curriculum. It's not their fault. Curriculum lessons are designed to be delivered by people who are there every day, who have a working knowledge of the students' strengths and weaknesses, who can adapt and adjust and see the Big Picture. Curriculum lessons layer one atop the other, and if you don't know what was taught prior to a particular lesson, you're hopelessly adrift. Substitutes who are aiming to become teachers themselves give every lesson left for them their most valiant try... but they haven't got the full curriculum guide to fall back on, nor do they have the time to learn all that came before.
And not all who substitute are hoping to be full time teachers. There was one lovely lady who subbed in my district for many years who routinely ignored any lessons left for students, preferring instead to engage the kids in long, detailed conversations about her cats. We shuddered when she appeared on the morning memo as a substitute... for the teacher whose classroom she covered, that was a lost day. Others think that they can "improve on" the lessons left for them, and it takes the better part of two days to unravel the leavings.
But I couldn't face teaching this week, not feeling the way I did. So I called in, and felt miserable for it. And finally, I did get a diagnosis... after two sets of doctors and one chest x-ray, it wasn't "just a cold" after all. It was bronchitis. And so here I am, feeling deeply uncomfortable and uneasy, wondering about the state of my classroom, and hoping that by Monday I'll have healed up enough to manage to drag myself into work.
I hate being sick.