Thursday, September 25, 2003
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
So you're single for what feels like forever. Oh sure, maybe you date a little here and there, but nothing you'd tell your folks about (or in some cases, nothing you'd tell your folks about without the fledgling relationship immediately being jinxed and washing up, tattered and forlorn, on the rocks mere days later). And yes, in this context, you kiss people and they kiss you, and maybe other stuff, but again, nothing to write home about. You know, if you were the sort to write home about such personal details. Then you meet someone you really like and you start spending all your time with said person and BAM -- you come down with a raging case of mono.
Yeah, that's right, mono. Mononucleosis. Yeah, the kissing disease, go ahead, get it all out of your system. Make your smart remarks about high school, call me mono girl, mock the sound of my voice as it squeaks out past my insanely swollen glands that somehow make me sound like I'm wearing a particularly bulky retainer. What, you think I haven't heard it all? All the jokes and snarky comments? Please, believe me, I've heard them.
Sure, I've seen the pitying looks too, and heard the compassionate comments, and received gleefully the homemade soup and four-litre jugs of water that went only a little way toward slaking my incredible, deep-down, older than my birthday thirst. In fact, I drank four litres in 12 hours a couple of weekends ago, and for once, I'm not talking vodka. Actually, for a while I feared I might never talk vodka again, since one of the many little gifts mono gives -- which all seem to keep on giving, like the swollen glands and the stuff at the back of my throat I can't seem to swallow and the killer fatigue that has become my constant companion -- is the real potential for liver damage. That or a burst spleen. Or sure, why not, even both.
On the liver front, I spent precious out of bed minutes every day examining my eyes for that tell-tale yellowish tinge. In bed, I peered at my fast-fading summer tan and thought, yeah, I am turning yellow. For sure my liver is fucked now. I asked my roommate every day if she thought my eyes looked yellow. No, she'd reply patiently. And then not so patiently. On the first day I was well enough to stand up for half an hour without sweating, I went to work. That night, I had two glasses of white wine and immediately felt a pain in my liver. So, back to bed to examine my eyes with a hand mirror.
As for the spleen, apparently any activity the mono patient might engage in -- which, believe me, is not very much at all beyond sleeping and sweating and forcing juice of all kinds over the baseball mitt that grows at the back of said patient's throat -- can result in a ruptured spleen. Yes, I hear you scoffing that the spleen is just one step up from the tonsil or the appendix, and yes, it's true you can live without a spleen, but you'll be more susceptible to infections (like, oh, mono) and also I think it hurts like the dickens when it explodes inside you. I am just saying. And so I laid in bed, sweating, sleeping, not eating and not moving. Every four days, I took a shower, and it took all my energy. I'd let the water run over me till my legs started to wobble like soft-boiled eggs. Then I'd haul my sorry self back to bed and lie there helpless while my hair knotted itself into a giant dreadlock that stuck out to the right of my head.
When I had the energy, I'd ring the Troublemaker and give him a piece of my sweaty mind. The first night, when he answered, I sweetly (though somewhat thickly) said, "how are you?" He said, "fine, how are you?" "I have mono," I answered. "Where'd you get THAT?" he exclaimed. "Where indeed," I mused. "It's called the kissing disease, so let's see, who've I been kissing. Uhhh, you?" (This burst of sarcasm left me ragged and worn out, which gave the Troublemaker time to ponder this turn of events.) He claims he hasn't had mono, so I said, "Jesus, you must be a superconductor, then. You know, you've kissed someone who has poison spit, and their poison got in your spit and it didn't make you sick -- that sometimes happens -- but you have the power to make other people sick." And he said, in his boyish way, "Excellent!" And I said, "No! Not excellent! Awful! I'm really sick!" But I could tell he still thought it was kind of cool, his new status as a superconductor. Boys. What're you gonna do, you know?
As it turns out, if you've kissed the Troublemaker recently, as I have, and you were a total bookworm word nerd in high school and didn't kiss anyone and so never got mono when other self-respecting teens did, you're going to use up 80 percent of your sick days, lie in bed all day long listening to them talk about mad cow on the radio till you feel like a bit of a mad cow yourself, become weak as a kitten, crave weird food, when you finally start to rally, like quarter pounders with cheese and spaghetti with meatballs and suicide wings, read a lot of books, fall asleep drooling on even more books, develop a low-level addiction to a daytime TV show called Crossing Over With John Edward, and begin making a mental list of ways the Troublemaker can make things up to you when next you're in the same city. Once you feel better, you transfer that mental list to paper and start making threatening phone calls to Halifax.
So now I have poison spit. Sometimes, the poison stays in your spit forever. Which is kind of handy, actually. It's just one more way to weed out potential mates. Have you had mono? No? Better not kiss me then.
So you're single for what feels like forever. Oh sure, maybe you date a little here and there, but nothing you'd tell your folks about (or in some cases, nothing you'd tell your folks about without the fledgling relationship immediately being jinxed and washing up, tattered and forlorn, on the rocks mere days later). And yes, in this context, you kiss people and they kiss you, and maybe other stuff, but again, nothing to write home about. You know, if you were the sort to write home about such personal details. Then you meet someone you really like and you start spending all your time with said person and BAM -- you come down with a raging case of mono.
Yeah, that's right, mono. Mononucleosis. Yeah, the kissing disease, go ahead, get it all out of your system. Make your smart remarks about high school, call me mono girl, mock the sound of my voice as it squeaks out past my insanely swollen glands that somehow make me sound like I'm wearing a particularly bulky retainer. What, you think I haven't heard it all? All the jokes and snarky comments? Please, believe me, I've heard them.
Sure, I've seen the pitying looks too, and heard the compassionate comments, and received gleefully the homemade soup and four-litre jugs of water that went only a little way toward slaking my incredible, deep-down, older than my birthday thirst. In fact, I drank four litres in 12 hours a couple of weekends ago, and for once, I'm not talking vodka. Actually, for a while I feared I might never talk vodka again, since one of the many little gifts mono gives -- which all seem to keep on giving, like the swollen glands and the stuff at the back of my throat I can't seem to swallow and the killer fatigue that has become my constant companion -- is the real potential for liver damage. That or a burst spleen. Or sure, why not, even both.
On the liver front, I spent precious out of bed minutes every day examining my eyes for that tell-tale yellowish tinge. In bed, I peered at my fast-fading summer tan and thought, yeah, I am turning yellow. For sure my liver is fucked now. I asked my roommate every day if she thought my eyes looked yellow. No, she'd reply patiently. And then not so patiently. On the first day I was well enough to stand up for half an hour without sweating, I went to work. That night, I had two glasses of white wine and immediately felt a pain in my liver. So, back to bed to examine my eyes with a hand mirror.
As for the spleen, apparently any activity the mono patient might engage in -- which, believe me, is not very much at all beyond sleeping and sweating and forcing juice of all kinds over the baseball mitt that grows at the back of said patient's throat -- can result in a ruptured spleen. Yes, I hear you scoffing that the spleen is just one step up from the tonsil or the appendix, and yes, it's true you can live without a spleen, but you'll be more susceptible to infections (like, oh, mono) and also I think it hurts like the dickens when it explodes inside you. I am just saying. And so I laid in bed, sweating, sleeping, not eating and not moving. Every four days, I took a shower, and it took all my energy. I'd let the water run over me till my legs started to wobble like soft-boiled eggs. Then I'd haul my sorry self back to bed and lie there helpless while my hair knotted itself into a giant dreadlock that stuck out to the right of my head.
When I had the energy, I'd ring the Troublemaker and give him a piece of my sweaty mind. The first night, when he answered, I sweetly (though somewhat thickly) said, "how are you?" He said, "fine, how are you?" "I have mono," I answered. "Where'd you get THAT?" he exclaimed. "Where indeed," I mused. "It's called the kissing disease, so let's see, who've I been kissing. Uhhh, you?" (This burst of sarcasm left me ragged and worn out, which gave the Troublemaker time to ponder this turn of events.) He claims he hasn't had mono, so I said, "Jesus, you must be a superconductor, then. You know, you've kissed someone who has poison spit, and their poison got in your spit and it didn't make you sick -- that sometimes happens -- but you have the power to make other people sick." And he said, in his boyish way, "Excellent!" And I said, "No! Not excellent! Awful! I'm really sick!" But I could tell he still thought it was kind of cool, his new status as a superconductor. Boys. What're you gonna do, you know?
As it turns out, if you've kissed the Troublemaker recently, as I have, and you were a total bookworm word nerd in high school and didn't kiss anyone and so never got mono when other self-respecting teens did, you're going to use up 80 percent of your sick days, lie in bed all day long listening to them talk about mad cow on the radio till you feel like a bit of a mad cow yourself, become weak as a kitten, crave weird food, when you finally start to rally, like quarter pounders with cheese and spaghetti with meatballs and suicide wings, read a lot of books, fall asleep drooling on even more books, develop a low-level addiction to a daytime TV show called Crossing Over With John Edward, and begin making a mental list of ways the Troublemaker can make things up to you when next you're in the same city. Once you feel better, you transfer that mental list to paper and start making threatening phone calls to Halifax.
So now I have poison spit. Sometimes, the poison stays in your spit forever. Which is kind of handy, actually. It's just one more way to weed out potential mates. Have you had mono? No? Better not kiss me then.
