Being sick

Well. I loved Sontag´s Illness as metaphor so much it seems apt to have an(other) entry on sickness. And timely, too!
I have come down with pneumonia. It is almost exciting. I cannot remember ever having had pneumonia. I even stopped smoking a week after I got back to Chile! The word pneumonia sounds scary and oldschool and it reminds me of TBC which again reminds me of Klaus Kordon`s “Die roten Matrosen” and the untimely death of its hero´s love pretty blond interest. And of course, TBC reminds me of Susan Sontag who writes in her great "Illness as Metaphor" that the “noble” death of the exihilarated thin (no appetite), “transcending” white (!) death of TBC was romantized in literature whereas things like cancer are an abject, gross, blaming-the-victim kind of sickness…
Well. Maybe the only thing I will really learn here is how to wait. It is certainly the only thing that I should learn, soon, if I am not to loose my mind! Rodrigo told me upon one of my impatient fits that impatience is a sign of having been pampered as a small child when all your needs were met immediately (apparently too much so). That kind of comment shuts you up, let me tell you… Although I`m talking “shut up” in the comic figure kind of way, incoherently mumbling and with clenched fists in your pocket…
Example: I went to the doctor. My appointment was at 6.30 but I had had another appointment at 4, and I did not feel up to clamber up the hill twice that day – feeling lousy, with heavy coughing, some kind of allergic skin reaction, completely congested and many more disgusting details I will spare you… Also, I foolishly thought showin up early at the practice might help squeeze me in a little earlier. When I entered the doctor´s office, at 7.15, I had certainly learnt I was wrong. It does not. Patience is a virtue and I haven´t got it.
The doctor however, was a real comic figure. He was small, bald, white-frocked, with a stetoskope stuck on his head quite permanently – are they called stetoskope? Those mirror-like things, a bit alien, like a hairband with a UFO attached to it. But he was friendly, entertaining, old-school (taking time for his patients, you see…). He insisted on showing Rodrigo the inside of my nose – “you should know what she looks like inside” (wtf!?!)-; I might mention that at this point various torture instruments were already stuck into my nose, so there was no possiblity of defense. After some more cleaning and coughing and explanations and a transcript to x-ray my lungs, I was also given a anti-histamin and anti-congestion shot – “gluttonal”! When my incomprehending outstretched arms did not waver, the syringe señora showed me: in the ass! Well! And I thought those days were gone!
I will return to my sickbed now, pop some more penicillin and wonder about my body, and after the narcisstic face changes into boredom, about other people´s bodies...