Malingerance

Remember me when I'm almost gone.

I naively thought the archaic term "malingering" meant that a sickness, a malady or something malignant was lingering. It does not mean that. In fact, it means something different altogether. It's basically a term meaning faking an illness or feigning sickness as much worse than it is to get out of some obligation, usually work. I haven't done that sort of thing since I was about eight years old. I recall complaining my stomach hurt, which I thought, "How would you know if I was fibbing?" In those days, your mother might call the local physician who would just pop by (Dr. Natashan? I think? I remember his daughter was in my class and was quite pretty. I knew the doctor had left town when she didn't show up to school). I hid under the covers, which made me quite hot and after when he saw me, I remember hearing him say to my mother, "He seems fine but he's a bit hot, probably nothing serious." Then mom made me eat two bananas to "glue my insides together" (a common way she would refer to stomach troubles), and told me to stay in bed, which went down in history as the biggest waste of a day off school that I ever experienced.

From then on, the fear of getting caught "faking sickness" seemed like too big of a risk. Our mother wasn't much of a poker player and would always call your bluff or entirely ignore you. If you skinned your knee, "psh, that's nothing." followed by some ancient and incredibly burning antiseptic, Mercurochrome (no longer in use due to alleged toxicity). If you twisted an arm or knee, my mother would ask if you could move your fingers or toes, and when you did the reply was, "Nothing broken. If it's a sprain, it'll heal well enough." It got to the point where you pretty much had to have a bone sticking out of a limb to get noticed. Even then I imagine my mother saying, "Oh stop making such a fuss, stick it back in and get a band-aid."

So it was that my brothers and I were more likely to "feign health" than illness. When I was a reindeer in a Christmas pageant in second grade, Jason Arns looked at me and said, "What's wrong with you? You're really red." When I answered, "Nothing…" it was lights out and I woke up sitting on my mother's lap thinking, "How did I get here?" Similar events happened when I got the flu shot in junior high, without knowing you shouldn't get a flu vaccine if you already have the flu. On another occasion my father stopped me from leaving his class (yes, as a rite of passage, myself and my brothers all had my father teach us in high school). I remember having a headache and struggling to stay awake (a real hazard when your father teaches a ponderous class on world religion). On the way out the door at the end of class, my father took my arm and asked what was wrong. I said "Headache." He said, as far as I can remember in my feverish state, "My son, you are literally green. Wait here." He returned a few minutes later to tell me my mother would be there to pick me up. This was an extraordinary circumstance and I thought I was in some kind of serious trouble. When my mother arrived to pick me up she seemed to confirm my father's assessment, "Oh, you are a bit green around the gills." then she laughed and I fell asleep.

As an adult though, having suffered years of many strange and mysterious maladies (most commonly migraines or unaccountable allergies), I have decided that rather than make much of a fuss, or heroically carry on, I do the practical thing, announce I am unavailable for any nonsense and retire beneath a rock until my wounds have healed. Throughout a recent lingering cold, I had been constantly hacking up slug-sized globs of mucous. Too much information? "Hold my beer.", said the following sentence. At some point, I appeared to cough and sneeze at the same time forcing out what looked pretty much like bits of brain suspended in gelatin. Once I had begun taking antibiotics, which notoriously turn your stomach a bit topsy-turvy, each seizure of coughing came with projectile mollusks from my throat and an added possibility of soiling myself. Coughs so severe to strain some muscles seem also to oddly loosen others, making leaving home inconvenient and full of jeopardy. I felt more like a giant earth worm; simply a tube of stuff with openings at both ends. Yet, we are told, this is just our body doing body things.

There came a day that despite feeling a little better, I just couldn’t do work. I had already tried working through it, muting myself when coughing, turning off video when I had to blow my nose, but I could go no further. In a way, it felt like it did when I was a kid, told to stay home from school for having a fever and spending the day in pyjamas and reading comics or drawing and colouring or listening to a record. Keeping in mind, when I was a kid daytime TV was all we had and it was crap, so to recap, no Internet, no streaming videos, no video games or any of that stuff. I remember having chicken pox at the same time as my brother Chris. At some point, we didn't feel that sick but I suppose we were still contagious and it was a day of books and board games and it was a grand old time. This time, almost 50 years later, I enjoyed podcasts, scrolling through Instagram, watching videos, reading comics and sketching. One podcast was discussed the theme of exploration. As I fell asleep with earbuds stuck in my head, I dreamt of space walks, volcanoes and deep-sea diving. While the antibiotics did their thing, I slept and let a day of malingerance do its thing.