I don't want to talk about it, but I’ve been sick since the beginning of October, leaving me unproductive and crabby.  The intruders this time were diverticulitis and bronchitis. The Covid test was negative.  Fortunately, I’m no danger at the moment to others, but food is a little treacherous, a hacking cough wakes me up at night, and I’m constantly fatigued.  

But I’m not terminally ill. It’s more like I’m being involuntarily put in time out, as though Mother Nature thought I needed to be disciplined.  Jie is determined that my diverticulitis is due to something American I ate behind her back.  And she's pretty sure the bronchitis is due to an outfit she told me not to wear the night it dipped below freezing.  I dispute those notions-- whenever I’m not busy coughing.

The biggest pain in all this is in my personality. Illness changes me. There’s a border between the land of Can-do and the land of negativity.  When I’m healthy, I roam throughout the land of Can-do.  I’m known for that.  People can always find me there, long after others have emigrated.  

Unless I get sick.  By the third day of physical affliction, you'll spot me stealing across the border into negative territory. If I periodically appear pleasant, I'm only pretending. It' a haul for me to get back to Can-do land.

I started my homeward journey yesterday, as the temperatures bounced back up to 80 degrees. Jie dragged me on a (slow) hike through Lake of the Woods, one of our county parks.  The trees had splendid colors. I was entertained by the oak and maple leaves floating to the ground.  Once in a while, a puff of breeze would catch a solitary leaf and shoot it through space like a paper airplane.  

The ground itself was strewn with acorns, hickory nuts, pinecones, and twigs.  You couldn’t put your foot down without hearing a crunch.  

The bright sun heated my sweatshirt and soothed my chest. The fresh air made me feel as though I was getting healthy.  

The pungent odors from the park triggered fond memories—from decades ago, when my parents would take us kids to parks in early fall: Krape Park in Freeport, Mississippi Palisades State Park, and White Pines Forest.  

The only trouble with yesterday’s outing was that I didn’t want to feel better.  Well… I did and I didn’t.  Why is it that humans so often resist recrossing the border, back to the land of Can-do? I’ve noticed this in others as well as myself.  We unconsciously resist being deported from the land of negativity… until we’re good and ready for it to be our idea, our choosing.  I could run with that puzzle today, but it feels too heavy. After all, I've been sick. We'll set it aside for the novel I’m cooking up.

After getting home from the hike I was pretty exhausted. I coughed half the night.  And so, I’m still on the border today:  half Can-do and half Can-tankerous.  But since I’m now determined to restore my normal cheerful self, I decided to use this post to give myself an assist. Let us thank God for all the diseases I don’t have at the moment.  And to make it more fun, I limited myself to 19^th century diseases that I can’t quite define without consulting a brittle and yellowed medical dictionary. 

I’ve heard of all these terms, either from reading really old books or from hazily remembering conversations with my Grandma Smith.  There’s the auge, the chlorosis, and the cholera, the colica, the consumption, and the coryza.  People used to suffer from crop sickness, debility, and dropsy.  They had dysentery, flux, and grippe.  They kept a wary eye open for hemophthis, impetigo, and pox.  Kids back then came down with lots of quinsy, and adults my age suffered pyrosis.  It makes me feel better to know I could be worse.  

I went to two different doctors this month for the diverticulitis.  The first put me on a clear liquid diet and gave me a bottle of antibiotics to eat.  Just four days later, the second doctor informed me that clear liquids and antibiotics don’t really help.  When I asked what did help, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Up to you. Do what your body tells you.” This may sound appalling, but compared to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, my doctors are positively brilliant.  

Just thinking of what I don't have isn't quite enough though to get me back to happiness. I thought that looking up some old cures doctors once gave might give me just the booster I need. And so, I looked them up so I could break out in rejoicing that they aren’t in vogue anymore. 

I came across an advertisement for Dr. Batty’s Cigarettes. (Honest, that’s his real name!) The flyer claimed that his tobacco would provide temporary relief for asthma, hay fever, foul breath, bronchitis, and canker sores. (It took a while for the tobacco industry to stop advertising the health benefits of smoking.)

In the 1800s, sexual urges were considered by some, including John Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, to be an illness caused by a bad diet.  Hence Graham invented his cracker and Kellogg his corn flakes.  These two captains of industry, who claimed to have never even consummated their own marriages, assured consumers that their dietary prescriptions would even cure people of wanting to touch their own selves.  But times change, and we now know that a good bout of diverticulitis… or bronchitis, is a much more effective anaphrodisiac than a cracker.  

During Victorian times, tapeworm eggs were prescribed to help people lose weight.  Theoretically, one swallowed tapeworm eggs, which hatched in one’s stomach, which then ate all the food headed there, which allowed the person to eat all they wanted without gaining weight.  This is no longer prescribed.

Bloodletting is another treatment that has gone by the wayside.  It is likely that George Washington died from his doctor’s cure.  The physician thought that draining “bad blood” out of the body would cure it.  And so he drained three quarts from the Father of Our Country, who promptly died and left us all alone with John Adams.  

Finally, there was the tobacco smoke enema. This explains the origin of several crude phrases I've heard over the years. But back in the 18^th century, blowing tobacco smoke up one’s south orifice was thought to cure headaches, colds, and cramps.  

Okay.  I feel better now, just knowing I live in the 21^st century.  I'm just about in control of my negativity.  

Evidence shows that living in the land of negativity is as bad for one's health as living back in the good old days.  

I’m still likely to wake up again tonight with a cough.  But if I do, I’ll wander into the kitchen and be grateful to find a little honey, a little whiskey, a little Vicks Rub, and a couple Tylenol tablets.

And if I should encounter a doctor sitting there, smoking a cigar, drumming his fingers on an enema balloon, and munching a bowl of corn flakes, I'll know it's only a dream, probably from taking something that will appall those living 100 years from now.