Talking About My Age—and My Illness
posted in Being Personal, Just Inspiring |So yesterday I skipped work (again). Well, not really skipped. I was ill, so my father rang the lady from the human resources development department to get the uni’s permission for me to have a day off.
The morning I woke up, I felt this been-days-felt kinda heavy breath everytime I inhaled and exhaled. I thought there was something wrong with my lung or something. Actually the heavy feeling wasn’t that heavy, but it was just that I didn’t have any motivation to go teaching (Tuesday is always the longest day for me—I teach until 9 p.m. every Tuesday). The illness, without warning, was pretty ’supportive’—I felt the heavy feeling even more in each of my breath, then I cried (don’t know why).
So I told my parents about what I felt in my chest, then my stepmom did the traditional kind of thing to my back and chest—spreaded particular oil there and rub those body parts slowly with a coin. Just something like that—you know, to get the ‘bad wind’ away from inside of my body. Apparently, the result of the coin-rubbing kind of revealed my truest health condition—I was ill, the real one.
Okay, my at-first-dramatized illness turned out to be a real one, but I was grateful, though. One, I didn’t have to teach those many classes on that long Tuesday. Two, I discovered my real illness. In the evening, my father took me to a pulmonologist (who was once our neighboor—the rich one). The doctor told me that my breath was in a good shape, but my kinda heavy breath lately was because of my ‘habit’—eating late and less. The habit affects the imbalance of the acid inside my body, and that affects my breath to be a bit heavier than normally.
Okay, just skip that acid kinda thing. I’d like to tell what happened earlier when the man before the doctor’s room wanted to record my identity. After asking my name (and commented that I looked really fine—and young, so that he was surprised knowing that I was the one who was ill, not my father—who accompanied me). And then, drums please, he asked how old I was. And let me tell you, people, I needed almost a minute to recall my age! My very own age! I wasn’t in a panic room. I wasn’t in a stage with lots of people before me. I was in a pulmonologist’s clinic, for God’s sake—and forgot my age!
I’m only 23 and I already have this ‘forgetting things’ syndrome? Uh-oh, not good news, for sure. I can still ring a bell how I am usually very concscious about what I’m doing, about who I am, and even about how old I am. But last night … I don’t know what to say about this, really.
Time to be more conscious, maybe.
