Being Ill

There are few things I enjoy less than being ill. They almost all fall in related areas (to illness and death generally) so there is no real reason to go into detail about it. You start out in pretty much complete denial. You are entirely certain that you are not ill. Then you start to think, well I must have upset my stomach with something, it just needs to work its way through the system. Then it's just a matter of cleaning things out and resting a bit and then finally you wake up a couple hours later and feel even worse, albeit in a different way, than you did before. And that's when acceptance has to come.
In our society, illness is really looked down upon. I didn't realize this until recently and I can only posit that most adults simply don't get sick. I have quite a bit of difficulty understanding people who claim that they go to work while ill. When I say I'm ill, I'm talking about not being able to stand for periods, occasionally crying out in pain, and a mental collapse on par with sleep in terms of loss of consciousness and ability to complete tasks or reason. Evidently, this does not happen to other people as I can guarantee they would not be at work if it did. I think others don't get the "full system" effect, as I refer to it. When I get sick, it's not a cough or a chest thing or a headache - I consider that occasional miscellany that I generally don't even think about; in fact, I wouldn't even think to associate those things with illness. When I talk about illness, I'm talking about the entire body shutting down. Your head is exploding in pain and as you writhe in bed trying to find some position that isn't going to cause you to vomit again, you slip in and out of dreaming and/or consciousness. That, is being sick. Anyone who claims to be able to deliver a decent work product under those circumstances is a liar and a fraud.
So it is likely that when people get sick, they simply aren't referring to anything like this. This jives with my conversations with others, whose faces tend to drop in uncomprehending stares as I explain my cold/flu symptoms. Also when people do get sick, they get sick, but they don't get the full body thing and most importantly, the brain is not implicated. They don't lose the ability to open a door because they can't remember how you do that and while trying to figure out how, use up all remaining physical strength and have to crash to the floor and generally fall asleep there, at least temporarily, remembering, perhaps a couple days later, what the point was of opening the door in the first place.
All this to say, I am terribly ill. I am hoping it a short term bug or food poisoning, really anything but the flu. And if it is, and it is that crazy swine flu thing, I think I should be able to sue the government for preventing me from getting a vaccine because they're oh so worried about the children. I'm sorry, but weren't they on top of this a while ago? What exactly is the point of the CDC if it can't even bother to protect us against pandemics that are only minor variations from known strains? What a joke. And furthermore, I would like to know whether there is preferential treatment in terms of the distribution of the vaccine as I heard last night that Stephen Colbert had gotten it and he does not fall into any of the high risk groups and it came out like Monday. I am not amused.