I don’t get sick very often. Once, maybe twice a year. It’s been 14 months since the last time I was sick. I remember, because I had a date and I had already rescheduled on her twice. I don’t believe in getting sick. It seems completely unnecessary and inappropriate once you’ve reached adulthood. My immune system should be aces by now. It’s had 38 years of practice plus 2.5 million years of human evolution. Nonetheless, a simple cold-virus causes a respiratory tract infection which then knocks me on my ass for 72 hours.

I’m still not running at 100%. Mostly it’s just the cough. I feel fine, but it’s one of those wretched chest heaving coughs that makes people stare at you like you’ve just been bitten by a zombie…or that you might be from Maryland. Call it a known manufacturing defect. I sneeze really loud and my coughs sound like I might only have five hours to live.

The worst part is knowing there’s nothing I can do to speed up the healing process. My mom always asks me, have you taken any cough medicine? Which one? I tell her yes, I’ve taken all of them, but Dextromethorphan (that’s the DM you see on the bottles), doesn’t really do much except helps to suppress the cough so you can sleep at night. Sometimes I think the only reason for taking cough medicine is so that people around you feel better. After all, no one wants to hear you cough.

Soup, tea, and sleep. Oh and I sometimes think Vitamins might help, but I really have scientific evidence to back that up. So here I sit at the blurry edge of sickness and health. Not quite sick but not quite healthy. Life sure would be simpler if I was a zombie. Zombies don’t get sick,  or fear rejection, or worry about climate change. They just want to eat brains.

I watch too many zombie movies.