What could he say anyway? I knew it was a throat infection. I knew it would probably spread to the lungs before it got better. I knew that my body had been trying to fight it off for a week, but had not managed to and that with the full force it hit me on Wednesday, I would need antibiotics and rest to get rid of it as quickly as possible. So I went and got my drugs and bunked in on the couch to wait it out.
I started thinking about the psychology behind illness. A lot of people have said to me either, “You’re so fit and healthy, you’re the last person I would have expected to get sick” or “You must have pushed yourself too hard. Plus there’s no body fat on you, how can you fight off diseases?”
It’s funny, I’ve just finished reading this book called “The Black Swan” which is fascinating (I heard about him through an interview with the author pushlished in the Good Weekend a few weeks ago, check it out here).
Anyway one of the ideas the author talks about is the narrative fallacy. Our brains are genetically predisposed to make us rationalise after an event, we feel like we can’t just let something be, but have to attribute a cause to everything. Once we’ve made it into a little story then we are comfortable with it. It’s like an obsession, to try to push meaning onto everything.
My story is this: People get sick. Fact. I have not met anyone who has never experienced a cold or the flu in their life.
Our bodies are attacked by pathogens all the time and the more we interact with new people the higher the chances of coming across a bacteria or virus our body has never dealt with before. Meeting new people is what I do for a living. Odds are that I will get sick every now and then.
The last time I was sick enough to go to a doctor (when I also just went to get antibiotics after having had a fever for a week that wasn’t going away) was in March 2005, over three and a half years ago. So the fact that I’ve been sick this week – what does it really mean? Why does it have to mean anything?
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