Comfortably Numb

My fever was over 100, I discovered Friday on my phone's unit converter after leaving the nurse's room. I then waited to be called to the doctor with the other ER patients. I sat and had some fizzy fever-reducing tablets. Earlier in the day, I lay out in the sun because blankets in my room weren't warm enough, but equatorial rays toasted me comfortably. I was nearly Pink on one side before I turned my head--gotta keep both cheeks even. "Hello?" I'd been called and couldn't quite hear the directions over the loudspeaker. Hesitantly walking to the door I thought I was supposed to go through, a doctor quickly found me and sat me down. He checked things off the clipboard as we talked, and gave me a ticket to go to the lab and get tested for...malaria. Oi. So back to the waiting room I went to queue at the barely-manned counters. I prevented fainting by sitting down on the floor for part of the wait. It was nice and cool. And not even wobbly, like it looked from far away. But eventually, I got to the front, paid my dues and headed for the lab.
Just a little pinprick and an hour's wait for results, and it was back to the doctor. No malaria. Grr. I was almost disappointed. I'd had a bad fever for the whole day, a debilitating illness, and it's just an infection? Not even one worthy of cipro? I went home with my amoxicillin and tylenol, happy to have found the simple solution and wondering if it was mostly in my head.
When I was a child, I had a fever. When it was pretty springtime (or occasionally in the fall) and the flowers of Minnesota or Michigan woke to greet the world, I would be ill. Sinusitis would take over my breathing for a couple days, but invariably I would miss a week or two of school. Every morning I would feel terrible and not able to go to school. Then, a couple hours later, I'd wish I weren't "sick" so I could go ride bike or play. In the evening, I'd be almost well, eating and joking, but then after dinner I would begin to deteriorate, sniffly and pitiful as I went to bed, not expecting to go to school in the morning. I often wonder how much of that was my own expectation interfering with my body's healing. Did I expect to be sick in the morning? Did I want to just skip school for a week?
Back at school today, I feel and act fully recovered, but I wonder out of habit, is it real? Did I really just get better immediately from my terrible sickness? I know that's what antibiotics do, but was I really needing to be that sick? I probably exagerrated a bit. But then I devalue my own experience, my own feelings about it at the time. I cannot function without trust in my senses, but I know they're broken, too. I don't perfectly see the world. I've got all these bits of me between me and das Ding an sich, that I'm just used to looking through. My eyes cover themselves. But experience is real, perception is real. "Is there anybody in there?" I have to assume you are real, too. For sanity's sake. But I must question my self-deceit, as I seek to live and experience and perceive truly and fully. I must tell myself truth if I am to tell others anything like it. Devaluing experience in general leads to escapism or Buddhism. If the world was good, if very God calls it so, I wish not to escape this world but to purge my illusions about what is truly good. To shine light. But I can't even tell which parts are false, whether I'm doubting unnecessarily or convalescing overmuch. I want to make sure I am not avoiding the world for the sake of escapism or timidity, but I need fresh eyes to see which parts are worth surgery.
Just a little flavor of the philosophical stuff I like to play with. I trust in the light, which will bring all things into itself, into knowledge of self, other, and God. God's good world is all around us, but it is broken. The world is beautiful, good, enjoyable, but we must not affix ourselves to the brokenness but to God's repair. He's still working on me--I'm not done dying--kids under construction--this is not how I am--Christian soldiers...with the cross going on before. "Behold, I am making all things new."
I saw a bright kid the other day who had just been given enough money to attend secondary school. I saw a poor mother who had just come to the hospital with no money for pills, but she was grateful for her son's diagnosis. I saw a bullying episode defused by a few quick words. I read a packet on proposed changes to Kenya's Constitution. I am glad to not be sick anymore, because I miss things when I'm distracted by myself.