Sick days

This weekend I stayed home sick and Jeff stayed to take care of me. Luckily, we got digital cable installed on Saturday, so both us and our guinea pigs made it out of the weekend alive.

My dad's a doctor, which is something I realize I took for granted growing up. It was just so easy. Viruses never led to trips to the doctor, or, thankfully, the ER because he knew what it was, if we needed medication, and if we did, he could prescribe it.

Flu shots and other vaccinations were often given at home while watching "Friends" reruns and "Look at this weird thing on my [insert body part here]" were always met with consoling medical phrases we didn't understand but trusted anyway.

Now my dad and the rest of my family live in Tennessee and I'm still in Wisconsin. Picture mail only works in some situations, and late night phone calls make me feel really bad.

It's just Jeff and me here, both of us with severely limited biology backgrounds, trying to do the right things for ourselves and each other without spending our life savings to find out that it wasn't blood, it was marinara sauce.

It almost pains me to see how worried about me he is. I have a pretty annoying cough right now and have been lethargic all weekend. He throws around words like "bronchitis" and "pneumonia" and I assure him I get coughs like this every winter. He says he doesn't remember it ever being this bad and I gently remind him he's only known me for two and a half winters.

I know if my dad were here he'd tell me I'm fine, yes, I still have to go to school (work) tomorrow and he'd ask if I'd like to go to the movies tonight as long as I cough on the person sitting on the other side of me.

I took it for granted that my family didn't really have to worry about each other when weird things happened to our bodies, because my dad could tell us it was ok. We didn't have to schedule our days around doctors appointments just so we could get a prescription of something we have to take every twelve hours for six days so we could move on with our lives.

My dad didn't become a doctor so he could be a reference for his family (and his oldest daughter's broke college friends), but it's definitely a perk. I know he'll always be there for me, Jeff and eventually, our family (I've asked about the guinea pigs, but it turns out med school and vet school are very different), but it won't be the same as living with a doctor, and eventually he'll retire.

When I imagine what my own family will be like, I never picture it much different than how I grew up. But it's always these little things, like actually having to schedule an appointment to get medication, that remind me how much it might be.

My parents made me as crazy as the next person's when I was a kid, but never because they worried about my health. They didn't have to.

If raising my guinea pigs is any indication of my future, I could very well be that mother on a first name basis with the ER doctors. At the very least, WebMD will be my homepage.

Jeff and I have both followed very different vocational paths than our parents did, and that means that our future family isn't cookie cut for us. But maybe we'll be able to offer things to our children we never imagined during our studies--things our parents couldn't, but maybe things we'll be able to give back to them too.