Everyone Takes Something for Granted

I am sick this week.  My head is stuffed up, and today I’ve left my sore throat behind for a dry, gritty cough.  It’s not serious, just enough to be irritating.  But then, I don’t usually get sick.  My immune system is one of those expensive programs that downloads updates all the time and can catch almost anything before it causes trouble.  So when I get sick, I tend to notice it.  A lot.

I’ve actually been running at less than one hundred percent for a while now.  Last week, before I became infected with viral plague, I was recovering from the removal of my wisdom teeth.  I’m told by my dentist mother that I healed very quickly and cleanly, but it didn’t entirely feel like that to me.  It didn’t help, I suppose, that usually I believe that medicine is for the weak, so once I was taking pain pills and antibiotics three times a day, my body was thrown off its normal rhythms.

I was complaining about this to a very good friend of mine last week.  She has a long-term illness that makes it hard for her to function sometimes, a fact I had forgotten in my need to whine.  When I remembered, I felt bad about it, but she waved it off.  “Everyone takes something for granted,” she said.

It was a simple statement, but it caught at me.  Everyone takes something for granted.  We’re human, and we don’t always focus on the important things.  Even when we do, sometimes something else important slips through the cracks.  Obviously, one of the things I take for granted is good health.  I expect it from myself, and when I do get sick I resent it and complain about it, probably more than I deserve to.  Whereas my friend, who is currently in the hospital, takes serious illness like this in stride and appreciates the days when she can be up and walking around.  Who has the greater level of grace?

Now I know I’m only thinking along these lines because I am currently sick.  Once I’m healthy again, I will probably go on my merry way without even remembering this post.  I’m human.  But for now, I will do what I can to not take my health for granted.  I will let this little head cold—and the memory of my friend’s wisdom—remind me that hey, it could be a whole hell of a lot worse, and I will be grateful that it isn’t.

PS--this was the first link on my dashboard, and was too providential a coincidence for me not to include it.  Read here for someone else who exaggerates the anguish of a bad cold.