"Rehab Follow-Up"

On my first rehab attempt I wrote almost nothing and afterwards wound up taking a two-hour nap.   

I may want to be ready to start ramping up, but I’m not certain I am.  (Apparently, there is more exertion required than pressing down the keys.)

I automatically hearken back to ten years ago when I contracted mononucleosis.  There’s a small demographic cohort for you – a sixty year-old man getting mono.  Echoing the unusualness of my current situation – getting Legionnaire’s Disease alone. 

Everybody gets sick.  But getting mono at sixty and Legionnaire’s Disease alone – it just seems…

Weird.

Another similarity with both afflictions involves the recovery process.  I am reminded of Mel Brooks’ “Two Thousand Year Old Man” answering the question about ancient times:  “What happened when you got sick back then?”, to which Brooks, as the character, replied,

“You just lay there till you got better.”

That’s what I did ten years ago.  And that’s what I’m doing again.  The only available treatment is time.

Another similarity, if you can handle it?  When they told me I had mono and more recently that I had Legionnaire’s Disease, my reaction on both occasions was identical:

“I have what?”

I remember ten years ago spending six hours lying in some cubicle with a curtain around it at Santa Monica’s Saint John’s Hospital (whose name I could not identify during a diagnostic examination even though I knew it, indicating something was suspiciously haywire with my brain.)   

They put a hydrating “drip” in my arm, they did numerous blood tests, they did a CAT Scan.  And six hours later, at about two in the morning, an E.R. doctor steps into my cubicle and says, “Mr. Pomerantz, you have mononucleosis.”  To which, as previously mentioned, I replied:

“I have what?”

“ Our tests reveal you have mononucleosis.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You know that I’m sixty.”

“It is definitely mononucleosis.”

“So what do I do for it?’

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“There is no treatment other than rest.”

“For how long?”

“It varies.”

I have a tendency to chuckle when I ought to be angry.  “You went to medical school to learn ‘It varies’?”

“So you’re not admitting me to the hospital.”

“No.”

“Is there a specialist I can see?”

“No.”

“Any medicine to help speed up the process?”

“No.  You just need to go home and rest.”

It felt like an anti-climax to me.  You’re in the hospital, you expect them do something.  I was relieved, of course – to not have anything worse.  But – and maybe it’s because I’m a comedy person – the diagnosis, to me, seemed…

Silly.

And now, here we are again.

“I have what?”

Oh well.  What are you gonna do?

I know.

Rest.