Day Two of Our Continuing Health Coverage

SICK DAYS WERE SO much better when we were kids.

Seriously. Think of what a sick day meant when you were a child. Seventy-five percent of the time, it was going to hit during the academic year, so you got to stay home from school. Other than school, what did you really have going on? Scouting? Swim lessons? Music practice? Nothing that couldn't wait. At most, a class chum might bring over some homework. Aside from that, however, you had nothing to do except convalesce and soak up some parental attention. What could you do? You were a kid?

Now, a day off from work means something so much different than a sick day during one's school days. If I'm taking off from work, I don't want to sit around the house doing nothing but screwing around on the Internet and watching TV. I want to sit in the park and catch up on some reading with fresh air in my lungs. I want to go to Atlantic City and throw some chips around on the felt. I want to use my train ticket to ride into NYC as a tourist, and revel in the many charms that great metropolis offers its visitors. I want to clean, improve, or move out of my apartment. I want to sit by the Hudson and watch the sun warm the Palisades or run its sweltering gaze down the brick balustrades of the Upper West Side. Add a companion or significant other and the opportunities increase exponentially.

Short of "sick days" taken to avoid mental collapse or physical assault on my smoother-brained coworkers, the real deal — hours spent on the couch waiting for symptoms to abate or in doctors' offices — profoundly sucks. I woke up early this morning, 4:00 to be exact, and not because I was catching an early flight to Vegas. My fever had come back, and I spent the next 2 hours tossing in an agitated state. I finally calmed down enough around 6:30, shortly after I called into work to let them know I was not going to come in. Based on how I felt at that point, I wasn't planning to do much besides fall back to sleep, bestir at some point, and cough my way through the day.

This is eventually how it turned out. The highlight of the day was getting regular mail service again. No sign of my goals list yet. I look forward to going to work tomorrow, as maddening as it may be, because if I can get to work, I can get to the gym, and make some real progress on the health aspect of my goals. I do recall one of them is to visit the gym at least four times per week. This level of activity will reinforce my immune system, which will help me avoid these nagging stops in the head-cold pitstop.