Sick of being sick

The "luxury' I perhaps miss most since becoming a mother? Being sick. Not that I'm never sick. It just doesn't work the same way anymore.

Before my son was born, being sick meant hanging out in bed or on the couch whenever I didn't absolutely have to be somewhere else. If only I was sick at the time or could play the trump card of "I'm sicker," my wife would make me soup and tea and the like. It's not that I was one of those sickies who needed total babying, but a few little gestures went a long way. If we were both sick, we would both lounge around, taking turns heating up the water or the soup while commiserating about our aches and runny noses.

But this is a thing of the past. Now it never happens that only one of us is sick. The most common progression: Son picks something up at preschool (don't they always?). I then catch it (probably because I'm also exposed to things at his preschool). Then my wife gets it.

The expanded version:

• My son starts to feel under the weather. This means extra-grumpiness, more accidents than usual. Once it's obvious he's sick, he spends a day or two at home, often not consecutively, as he'll start to seem better and then run a fever again.
  
• At this point, I'm starting to develop the same thing. I almost always ignore a cold for the first couple days--denial is my first line of defense. But by the time I'm finally willing to utter the statement, "I'm sick,"...
• My wife gets sick. Now I always think of her as incredibly healthy--she's in good shape and her weight is under much better control than mine. Her immune system, however, is not as strong as mine, so it almost always hits her twice as bad as anyone else.

As a result, I almost never get to the point when I feel I can say, "I'm too sick to do anything today." And on those occasions when I do get to that point, I'm often the healthiest of the three of us and have no choice but to soldier on. I almost got a true sick day to myself last month, but that turned into my nightmarish Friday the 13th.

This is the long way of saying I'm still sick. Yesterday, after a few days of sudden dizzy spells and extreme exhaustion, I took a pregnancy test. Despite being on day 4 of my period and knowing it was impossible. It wasn't until after it remained decidedly negative that I put everything together and came to the conclusion that all of this congestion and such has turned into a sinus infection. So now I am on an antibiotic. My cough has gotten worse again, but I'm hoping that is just a result of everything that's getting flushed out of my head. With all luck, this will all be cleared up before my next trip to the fertility clinic.

So that the next time I feel like crap, it will be worth it.