Sick Bed

I’ve blogged about this before, but it is so bizarre that I feel the need to blog about it again.

The summer after Chris and I were first married, I came down with a terrible summer cold. We had just moved to Connecticut, and I think it was a combination of allergies, exhaustion from the move, and dealing with a new environment. Whatever it was, it wiped me out. I sent Chris an email from work telling him that I didn’t feel good and that it was his first opportunity to act as my caretaker in our marriage, and was he up for it? He replied, “Absolutely!”

Little did I know he was actually planning on trying to kill me.

I made it through the work week okay, but by Saturday, I was feeling really bad and was looking forward to a weekend in bed. Like a normal sick person. But, my caretaker had different plans. Saturday morning, Chris literally kicked me out of bed.

“What are you doing?” I moaned. “I just want to sleep!”

“You can sleep,” he insisted, guiding me into the living room. “But you need a sick bed.”

Apparently, when Chris was growing up and became sick, his mom made him a bed on the couch so that he could lay in there during the day instead of sleeping in his bed. “It keeps you from feeling gross at night,” he said. And I understood that. Kind of. But I didn’t care if I felt gross. I wanted my own bed. But we were newlyweds and I thought it was sweet that he was taking care of me (no offense, but newlyweds can sometimes be stupid…) and so I went where he sent me.

But as I’m laying on the sick bed, he walks back into the living room with a sweatshirt and a pair of wool camping socks.

“Here,” he said. “Put these on.”

“Why?” I asked, skeptically.

“Because you need to sweat it out.”

I was already running a fever. The last thing I wanted to do was put on a sweatshirt or wool anything. But, again, I tried to play along for the sake of my sweet husband. So, I wrapped myself up and prepared to “sweat it out”… whatever that was.

Fifteen minutes later, I was a hot mess. I was so feverish that I thought I was going to start hallucinating. I could have sworn that I saw angels hovering near a very bright light. But I can’t be sure. Might just have been Lucy sitting near a window. Anyway, I was not happy. I ended up ripping all my clothes off and climbing into bed.

Come to think of it, perhaps that was part of Chris’s newlywedded plans all along…

Still today, when Chris gets sick, he puts on as many layers as he can handle and “sweats it out” on a sick bed in the living room. Though, he has long since stopped trying to make me participate.

Chris is sick this week. He has the cold that I had a couple weeks ago and is trying to fight it off. He even said he might stay home tomorrow from work. I can count on one hand the number of times he has missed a day of work in the entire twelve years we’ve been together. Seriously. So, I think he might be dying.

Tonight, he was complaining about being so cold and just not being able to get warm enough. So, I did the only thing I could think of. I snuggled up to him real good, and smothered him until he couldn’t breathe.

“Thanks for taking care of me,” he managed to grunt.

“Sure thing,” I said. “You know, when you have a buddy, this sick bed isn’t so bad after all.”