Am I sick, if I enjoy being sick? I am actually trying to understand this, so please don't dismiss this as a stupid question that tries to invoke some circular logic and plays on different meanings of a word. I am really wondering, if it means I am sick. Whichever meaning of the word you take. Because, my dear well wishers and others, I have fallen sick. I don't fall sick that often, meaning I must have been bed ridden for about 10 days in the last 10 years or so. So far, I have not had to take a single day off from work because I was sick. Same about college, and school before that, for as far as I can remember.

But this last week, we fell sick. Being the leave hoarders that we are, we still turned up at work, a pretty awful mess, with the awwws and ooohs, pouring in. But thats a separate story. So, I have this insane, uneducated philosophy, that if I act like I am well, then I get well. Sooner than I would have otherwise. That means I scoff at medicine, diagnosis, and its application to society, pop a pill that I have prescribed myself (Go Robin Cook, go Google docs!), and I get on with life. But this time, we must have caught something we haven't read about in a Robin Cook or a Michael Palmer, for ordinary OTC pills didn't cut it. So when I got home one day from work, crabby and irritable, with joint pain and fever and stuff, I just dove into bed. And believe it or not, I enjoyed the whole deal. Lying in bed with shivers and chills running up my body, moaning loudly releasing some anger, looking at the ceiling with the white light appearing a sick, dull, jaundice yellow, and crying tears and feeling the strange comfort of the warm liquid trickling down my throbbing temples. The ache in my eyelids offered me a sense of freedom from the mundane fears and worries that plague me all day. I could almost see why someone who is sick, might want to die. The traditional reasoning of getting liberated from the misery apart, I am sure there must be some people who are tempted to push the pleasure as far as they can, and so they beg to die.

I had almost forgotten how it feels to be sick. Mind you, I had no one to take care of me and to get me soup and stuff. But still, or perhaps hence, that somehow heightened the pleasure of it all. Like I knew I had to take care of myself, because no one else cared to. And thankfully, that has egged me to take this frikkin virus head-on. And for some sick reason (oh the irony of it!) I am enjoying the fight and that ended up in me enjoying my sickness.

But could it be? Can you miss being a different and particular kind of miserable so much, that when the time actually comes, you enjoy that misery? At least for a little while? Isn't this like some weird paradox or something? Not that I was ever one to care, but I don't mind considering throwing all health related caution to the wind and falling sick, till I get sick of it. Or die.

What good are those leaves and compensatory offs anyway!