Being Sick
As a relatively healthy person I get sick more than anyone I know. I'm actually currently sick. I have a very mild sore throat that has persisted for close to a week, and feel a bit of body fatigue. As far as being sick goes it's one of the mildest bouts of sickness.
I was sick about a month ago as well. When I was in high school I remember being sick on a monthly basis. Usually the experience of being sick completely wipes me out. Once my throat was so inflamed it hurt just to turn my neck. Occasionally, I feel so terrible that I'll visit an urgent care even though I know that not much will happen. Well sometimes they'll give me steroids to ease the pain, but then another medical professional will mention that steroids are a short term solution, because they weaken your immune system.
Thankfully Covid has normalized staying home, and resting when you are sick. Prior to that when I was sick I would try to keep up my work or school obligations. It's a miserable experience to have to navigate through a school, and try to concentrate in class when you probably should be in a bed sleeping.
In addition to being sick more frequently I have the suspicion that I generally feel worse than the vast majority of people. When I see people who are sick they still seem to be in good spirits, they can still be active. Oftentimes when I am sick I feel that I am close to approaching death.
Medically there doesn't seem to a concern. I'm not immunocompromised. My blood tests come back normal. I stay relatively active. I don't overeat. My perception of medicine is that as long as you aren't dying / don't have something that has a set way of being treated then you are fine. The approach is similar to my perception of psychology. Psychology / therapists are oriented around solving your problems instead of framing how they can make you thrive more. The case in point is that a separate field of psychology exists Positive Psychology to specifically focus on making you happier than you already are as opposed to removing or addressing specific problems you have.
As a side note this is one of my qualms with my limited experience in therapy. Once I went to therapy and spent one hour concentrating deeply on an unpleasant interaction I had with my brother. An interaction that I don't remember now. What I do remember is I hadn't come away from the experience feeling more enlightened. I was only more frustrated. Generally, I felt that therapy would take a magnifying glass to a tiny problem. It seemed that the act of therapy was making me more frustrated and annoyed at things that really weren't problematic to begin with. Other insightful friends have pointed out that therapy is a workout for your brain / emotions, so it's entirely normal to be frustrated or for a session to be charged, and I agree with that. I also agree that it can be difficult to find an effective therapist, and that you can find a therapist that can do you harm.
Anyway back to common cold like sicknesses. Something I think about is that we have no way to know if other people are experiencing similar sensations or experiences to us. My first reaction to a picky eater is to think that they are a difficult person and that they aren't open to experiences. However, upon slightly further reflection I figure if they could lend me their mouth and their tongue I too would share their preferences. It's like the saying don't criticize someone before you walk a mile in their shoes, except it's saying don't criticize someone until you walk in their feet, in their body, etc.
Separately, because our experiences from one person to another can have a lot of variability it makes it even harder to have the language to describe what is happening. When I was 1 year old and couldn't talk my parents figured out that I had acid reflux. At first it seems really hard to figure that out, but maybe I threw up some bile, cried, and it was easy to piece together. However, once I got older I never learned the name for acid reflux, and simply experienced this in silence until a lot later I learned it had a name and it wasn't normal. To this day I still am not sure what heartburn is, because its name seems so distant from what I presume the actual experience to be.
The reason I mention the discrepancy in description, and experience is because in early 2020 I had been sick for weeks. I would feel very tired throughout the day, and I would be very out of breath when I went up the stairs. In the news you would hear reports of covid. At the time I didn't think I had covid, but now I suspect there's a good chance I did. When I talked to the nurse practitioner she suggested that I had allergies. This hypothesis didn't align with my notion of what allergies were whatsoever. To me allergies were always associated with an itchy throat, itchy eyes, and a runny nose versus being sick is associated with a sore throat. These are distinct feelings. When I have allergies my throat isn't dry, but at that time my throat was dry. Thankfully, what ends up happening regardless of ailment is that since my body is still relatively healthy it heals overtime. It's unfortunate though that in this case there wasn't much of a conversation about the differences in experiences. I had mentioned that allergies never felt like this to me, but the nurse tried to claim that I had never experienced living in a place where allergies are more server, despite the fact that at this point I had already been in San Francisco for about 2.5 years. When I mentioned this then they moved the goal posts to say that allergies were worse this year than the years prior.
Even though I am making the case that it's helpful to have a language to describe being sick. I am confused by the conversational patterns around being sick. Often when you mention you are sick people will usually ask what your symptoms are. Maybe this is because my symptoms are often the same, but I never feel that a description of my symptoms will change what people say next. Usually what people suggest next are home remedies for feeling better, as if somehow you've magically made it this long without knowing how to take care of yourself, or as if the reality is that their remedy is going to make you feel better much quicker. To be fair, people are only trying to help, they themselves know how uncomfortable being sick is, and they want to support you, and help you get to a healthier state sooner rather than later.
Perhaps one of the most effective elements of a home remedy is their association to the placebo effect. The placebo effect is tremendously impactful. In fact, Nick (the person in the screenshot below) buys sugar pills from Amazon, and decides as he takes them what the placebo impact is going to be from the pill.
If I had to land on one explanation on why I am sick too often it's because I'm too much of a skeptic. A former colleague once told me that anytime he felt the onset of a cold coming he would simply tell himself nope I am not getting sick. Conversely, anytime I feel slightly sick I figure that I am about to get sick, and that's what usually happens. For a small period of time I was able to adapt this new mantra of not getting sick, and it did prove effective for a few months, but my normal disposition of not believing things probably won out, and now I am back to being sick more frequently, unfortunately. Perhaps I have the solution at arms reach but it's hard to get a firm grasp on it.