The benefits of being sick

Actually, there's no benefit to being sick...unless you're Mr. Mick and it's your bunny-mum who is sick.

A couple of weeks ago, I got hit out of the blue by a virus; swollen glands, sore throat, earache, low-grade fever, coughing, and general misery. Fearing that it might be strep throat (to which I am highly prone) and not wanting to suffer more than necessary, I immediately went to the doctor's.

Good news: no strep

Bad news: no quick-fix. A virus can only be waited out; you can take pain relievers or other meds/treatments to alleviate the symptoms, but not much else. This particular virus, I was told, usually lasts about 4-5 days.

So I spent the next 4-5 days glued to my living room couch because I was too miserable to do much else. I used my cell phone to check email, read bunny blogs and post occasionally on Facebook and Twitter, but otherwise I laid there, occasionally watched TV and slept.

The menfolk were not much help; they generally try to avoid dealing with sick people unless they're the ones who are sick (and then they want 24-hr. attention because they are DYING, dammit). Fortunately, I had the best of bedside care from Dr. Mick, who was happy to sit on my chest for three hours and lick my face for the small price of an ear rub. He was also more than happy to take advantage of the fact that, because I was not able to sit at the computer, he got to have access to the living room for a few days.



It always amazes me how excited he gets when he gets to go in there. I swear that lazy bunneh never runs so much or so hard as when he's in the living room. Our dining room (his regular exercise space) is nearly twice the size of the living room, and he very rarely runs full-tilt in there unless he's running one of his Bunneh 500 laps from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen and then back into the living room. You'd think the newness of the territory would wear off after a while, but it never does. He's even expanded his repertoire of living room activities to include leaping up beside me on the couch, which only gets him picked up and set back on the floor again. (The main reason he's not allowed in the living room unless strictly supervised: the first time he ever hopped up on the couch, he peed on it.)

Sure enough, after about 5 days, I was feeling about 95% better. I've still got a bit of a cough, and my voice still has a little rasp to it, but I can function normally again. I'm back on the computer, which means the living room is once again off-limits for the most part to Mr. Mick, so now I get to hear the sound of a grumpy bunneh shaking the baby gate that blocks his way every night.