I don't get sick.
I refuse to get sick.
I don't get sick, I get more awesome.
This habit of mine, of not admitting that I'm sick until I'm dying, started when I was younger. There were a few things that caused this. The first was that if you were sick, you couldn't go out and do anything. If you wanted to be with your friends, you better not have been sick that day. If you're sick, you miss out on what you're doing in school, or any activities that you're part of, and you miss out. If you're sick you don't do things, so you better only take a sick day when you're absolutely sick and you know that you can afford it in the missed hours and experience that you're going to not have because you're stuck at home doing nothing for an entire day.
Then also there were allergies. Any person that has had severe allergies knows that when you get allergies, you feel like you're sick all the time, every day, until they're gone. Claratin and other drugs are nice, but in the long run, you just feel slightly less sick than you normally do. Allergies make it so you don't ever consider your health 'good' you just count it as 'not as bad as it could be'.
That meant that while growing up I only said that I was sick only if necessary. It didn't matter if snot was flowing out of my nose, if I was coughing up a storm, or even if I had no voice, I stretched it as hard as I could and I made it work. Sickness wasn't an option.
This then only got worse on the mission. Every day on the mission you are told that you are serving God. You're God's worker bees, and it's up to you to do your job. Your job is to be active, talking to everyone, converting the world, and there is no time for being sick. If you get sick, you don't just bring down yourself when you're on a mission, but you also stop your companion, and ultimately are stopping the salvation of everyone that you could have talked to that day. Getting sick on a mission isn't just a sick day, to the mind of an elder it holds the weight of an eternal consequence. There were many times that on the mission I should have taken a sick day and stayed in for the day, but I didn't because there were more important better things to do.
That leads to now.
I don't get sick. I can't afford it. Getting sick means that I miss out on two jobs worth of pay. Getting sick means that my students fall a day behind and there's no substitutes at the college level, so they don't get class. Missing a day because I might be sick means that I don't get paid for anything that I do that day, and not having that money is not an option. Even when I do get sick, I will always go to work, because I need the money.
Let me make that perfectly clear. I am a well educated adult with a masters degree and teaching in my field of study, but if I am unable to take a sick day at either of my two jobs, without it docking my pay. If I take a sick day or alter my hours in any way, I get less money. I do not have the option for sick or vacation days, so I can't do it. I don't have the flexibility in my life to allow me to loose that money, so I work. I cough, I sneeze, I ache, I freeze, and I do whatever else is needed of me because I can not afford to sleep on my bed for a day.
That's the worst part about this. I don't choose to lie about being sick because I'm stubborn, or even because I'm uneducated. The reason that I do not get sick, and I fight every sickness I get with gallons of orange juice and an extended napping schedule, is because I don't have any other option. I don't get the option to take a sick day. I don't have the option to sit at home. My only option is to work. If I stop working, bills don't get paid, it doesn't matter how healthy or sick I am, that is the sad truth of the life that I am living in right now.
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