I’ve spent this past week working from home due to a wicked flu. I will say, I’ve only had the flu a handful of times in my life. Luckily, I never caught a lot of illness from school.
That’s not to say I wasn’t sick. I grew up with a pretty severe dustmite allergy, and with a 100 year old house with a Michigan basement, an allergic reaction was unavoidable. I usually spent winter days inside with some kind of upper respiratory problem: pneumonia, bronchitis, even allergy-induced asthma.
Since moving out of my childhood home, my allergies have gotten a lot better as now our basement is finished and I’ve lived in houses only a fraction as old as that first house.
But sick days as a kid offered a different kind of freedom I appreciated. I didn’t have homework to do, as this was before we were able to get any assignments online, and I was usually home alone once I was old enough because my parents both worked. So I would spend the day watching shows and movies that I loved.
I have all eight seasons of Full House on DVD, and I watched them countless times as a kid and teenager. There was never much interesting on daytime TV after the morning talk shows (I think I was the only middle schooler who religiously watched Good Morning America and The Doctors when I wasn’t in school), and there weren’t streaming services to use so I had to rely on DVD and VHS tapes. I also watched Scooby Doo movies, the first three seasons of Roseanne, and an assortment of seasons of Two and a Half Men.
And even now, I have spent evenings watching the Scooby Doo movies from the 90s and early 2000s, and rewatching the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, which I loved as a kid.
There’s something about watching things I loved as a kid. The comfort of knowing what’s going to happen (which means I can doze off and not miss anything), as well as experiencing a piece of media I loved and still being enraptured by it.
Since my husband is not sick, I’ve been staying isolated in our room so he doesn’t catch the flu. There isn’t much to do after work except watch comfort TV and cuddle a dog.
I’m finally on the mend, luckily. Partially thanks to comfort TV, partially thanks to medicine, and partially thanks to the two fluffy nurses who haven’t left my side all week. They’ll be very disappointed when I have to tell them that they’re out of a job for the time being.