on my potential as the carrier of the plague

I think that if biomedical warfare ever needed to be started, I would be a good candidate for the initial carrier of the disease.  Why?  Because my immune system is perhaps the wimpiest part of my body and I'm 99% guaranteed to catch it, and catch it good.  Or bad, depending on how you're looking at it.

My immune system used to be a champ!  I would stay up all night, wake up early, eat nothing but ravioli out of a can, and never take vitamins.  Good old IS didn't even bat an eye.  Every fall and spring, he would remind me that he and Allergies were still in cahoots, leaving me with the equivalent of whooping cough for about a month.  About once an academic year I would catch a virus from a roommate, what I always took as routine exercise for my faithful IS.  I didn't mind it so much because he had kept me out of the hospital my entire life.  I hadn't even thrown up since age 12!  If there was an award for solid, reliable immune systems, mine would definitely be a candidate.

Until 2009.

You'd think that three years in college, with roommates continually in close proximity and late nights a routine, would have been the worst time for my immune system.  It wasn't.  In fact, looking back, I'm pretty sure IS was feeding off the antibodies produced by said roommates and maybe even classmates, because as soon as I graduated and spent a summer away from classes, he started sleeping on the job. 

"Pneumonia?!" I exclaimed--or I would've if I hadn't been a dishtowel lying pathetically on the couch for days on end.  "Who gets pneumonia in the summer?!"  (Which is also the question that everyone else posed, as if I had chosen a really bizarre time to have my lungs fill with fluid.)  For the first time in my life, I was in the hospital for myself.  My deathly fear of needles drew a few tears when they put in the IV--I had never had one before--but I was so desperate to feel better that they probably could've cut off a finger with no complaints from me (and at Stonewall Jackson Hospital, I wouldn't have put it past them).  A few hours later, I was back home, too weak to sit up long enough to change my clothes.  Obviously, it all ended well (thanks to Sam, Kirsten, and Ashley, who bought my groceries and made me soup), and I even made it to Robin's wedding that weekend, even though I did feel a bit like Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after he hasn't set foot outside the bed in years.

That was my immune system's first treachery.  I made it through the fall without major incident, leading me into a false sense of security, and then a few days before my wedding in January I started feeling weird.  Naturally, I wrote it off as stress, and even a definite fever in the hotel room the night before didn't tip me off to what was coming.  My wedding day went without a hitch (thankfully--can you imagine a feverish bride in the middle of January?) and I had about five days of Costa Rican awesomeness before my appetite disappeared.  I would feel ravenously hungry, and then take two bites of food before feeling full to the point of discomfort.  (Ricky wound up eating double for a few days!)  I attributed it to sun poisoning, and stayed off the beach for a while.  Long story short (most of you already read the honeymoon story), I wound up having mono.  And strep.  And an excruciatingly long, painful flight back to America, where it took me a week to feel strong enough to open a wedding present and another week before I could stand up long enough to make a sandwich.

That was the second blow.

Since mono/strep ended in March, I've had a hospitalizing kidney infection (delirium at 104 degrees, anyone?) and a UTI.  Ricky caught a virus recently, and it took me a whopping three whole days to catch it, and catch it better (worse?) than he did, leaving me powerless against the productivity of normal life and schoolwork.  I think my white blood cells have just started throwing down their arms at the first sign of illness.  "We surrender!" they cry pathetically. "Take the red cells!  The red ones!"  If I could shrink down to cell size and enter my own body (a la Magic School Bus), I would definitely give them a good talking-to.  Maybe even some well-placed punches.  Maybe then Immune System will straighten up and remember who's boss.  (Me.)


As a side note, I feel the need to say that I'm very fortunate to have avoided life-threatening illness, unlike so many friends and family members.  I'm not trying to demean their sicknesses in any way.  Instead, I'm just making myself feel better about my own by adding some cool mental images of me punching blood cells like a beast.