Emily Kaye Lazzaro

How was your three-day weekend?  Mine was good, I got a cold.  Cue my mother: “You and Billy are always sick.”  No!  No we’re not.  We are just sometimes sick.  And usually at the same time, so it’s not just one person being sick and having to sit around for three days, because it’s staggered.  So I’m sick for three days, then Billy’s sick for three days.  So everything is annoying for six days.  I actually dislike Billy being sick more than me being sick–no, not because I hate seeing him feeling bad and being unhappy, but because it means I have to do all the housework and he is not a good conversationalist when he is sick and it is boring and lame.

The dynamic changes pretty drastically when the illness goes from me to Billy.  When I get sick I lay in bed watching old episodes of 30 Rock and as soon as one episode ends I look around and go “uuuuggghhhh Billyyyyy I feel terrible.”  And he brings me tea or whatever else.  When Billy gets sick he plays video games for eight hours and ignores me.  It stinks!  He doesn’t eat anything and he plays video games with the single-minded focus of someone who is trying to avoid having feelings, but in this case the feelings are just a stuffy nose and a sore throat.  I hate it.

Let’s talk about Great Illnesses from The Past, shall we?  Before we met, Billy got mono so bad he almost died.  It was the last semester of his senior year of college and he didn’t pass a couple classes so he got to walk at graduation but then he had to stay on campus for the summer and take classes to actually officially graduate.  He showed me a picture from this illness, he’s in the hospital hooked up to an IV and he looks like a heroin addict.  Another time, I had a really bad cold for a few days and took Thursday and Friday off work.  We were going to Vermont that weekend and I decided on that Friday that I was well enough to go, and I was only going to get better anyway, so we shouldn’t cancel the trip.  We carpooled with three other friends, got to Vermont, and I promptly passed out.  It turned out I had bronchitis and a sinus infection and I was considering having Billy drive me to a hospital because I thought I was dying, but we were in the middle of nowhere and we had ridden up there with friends so we had no way to go home.  I couldn’t talk or move.  I spent the weekend eating only ice cream and watching Arrested Development and sleeping like a dead person while Billy had roman candle fights in the yard because I wasn’t conscious enough to put a stop to it.  Another time, Billy got a bad cold on my birthday.  I really like my birthday and it’s already a week before Christmas so it tends to be disappointing but this was extra disappointing!  Another time… Okay, fair enough, Mom, we get sick a lot.