REMINDER (PART 1)
I’ve been waiting for this for years. It has loomed over me as my friends my age suddenly are struck by cancer or Alzheimers or heart problems or Covid. Many, probably most, of the people I have cared about my age as friends or family have died. The younger generation, my children and former students, people much younger than me are my support and that is very, very nice.
But it a constant certainty is that something is going to happen to slow me down and finally, suddenly, be the thing that ends my life.
I don’t want to be melodramatic, but this week, five days before I leaving with Susie and Todd for a three month odyssey around north India and Europe my body showed my age and my vulnerability.
It started on Tuesday night at 9. At 8 I was feeling great and talking with Susie on the phone about our trip. By 9 I was beginning to shake from head to toe. My teeth were chattering, my hands were fluttering, my legs were bouncing. I knew what it was, flu, from memories of childhood flu. And then at 10 the shaking suddenly stopped and I slept through the night.
On Wednesday I felt weak and tired and listless and spent most of the day sleeping, not eating a thing, but drank a lot of fluids because that is what you do with the flu. By the afternoon my son was urging me to call the Family Health Center to get advice. I knew there was nothing you could do for the flu but I called anyway. I got an appointment for Thursday morning in the Respiratory Clinic at the center. Wednesday night I began shaking violently at 9 and shook for two hours unable hold the Tylenol PM bottle still enough to read it until I put in on a table. I was still shaking and couldn’t see very well. But I had taken two pills earlier and thought that I read that I should only take 2 within 24 hours. I lay back down and then after 2 hours the shaking suddenly stopped again and I slept the rest of the night. This sudden shaking and stopping didn’t feel like flu to me, which is continual fever and shaking.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 