Don’t Tell Me You Never Get Sick

If I have a cold (as I do now), when you tell me “I really never get sick,” I take that as an invitation to sneeze in your salad.

Come on, you know you gets colds and the flu as often as the rest of us even if you do run 10 miles a day, eat nothing but free-range organic vegan spices recommended by Dr. Oz to improve the immune system, and never go out in public without bagging your hands in Ziplocs.

What kind of weird human behavior is it to deny you ever get sick even as your nose starts to run and your voice becomes scratchier than a pubescent boy’s? I admit that I used to be this way myself, thinking I was stronger, faster, and smarter than the average virus. I hated seeing ads for commercials that promised to cut two days off a cold because that meant I had to admit I’d be sick for at least that long. But it turns out that I am human, hear me sneeze.

I’m not saying we should all milk the sniffles for all the tofu noodle soup and blankets we can get out of our friends and loved ones, but neither should we deny our own vulnerability. You can live a healthy life and take precautions (I myself have switched to fist-bumping instead of hand-shaking) and still come down with the common cold. If it wasn’t common, it would be called the “rare and unusual cold.”

So if I run into you in the cold remedy section in the drugstore, don’t try to pretend you’re just buying this stuff for a friend. The tissue hanging out of your pockets is a dead giveaway. Admitting you’re sick will make you feel better. It’s about the only thing that will.

Ex-squeeze-me

One of the advantages of aging and having your breasts sag slightly lower than they did when you were, say 3, is the your annual mammogram is a lot easier. It’s not so hard to pull your breast tissue away from you body, when it’s already been headed in that directions for years. Mine have moved so far south, they’re living in a trailer park in Arkansas, drinking Lone Star and watching Wheel of Fortune.

For someone whose first mammogram caught on fire (you can read my Erma Bombeck award-winning piece about that here: http://www.accidentalcomic.com/columns/firstmammo.pdf), Friday’s visit to Jiffy Squeeze and Lube was uneventful. Well, there was another, much younger, woman named Leigh Anne there. I’m sure she spelled her name differently, but because both of us disrobed and made it to the waiting room with our stretchy keys around our wrists at the same time, there’s always the chance that our results will get mixed up and I’ll get a phone call from the mammography tech asking me how I’ve managed to get my boobs to be young and perky again. A girl can hope.

Oh, and the tech did tell me I have incredible pec muscles. She may have been flirting, but I’m never sure. I attribute my fine musculature to walking three dachshunds who always insist in traveling in opposite directions at great rates of speed whenever a squirrel crosses the road. Who needs the Mark Eden Bust Developer? Actually, who, besides me, even remembers it?

I hope to get a phone call on Monday from a nurse telling me that everything is fine. If so, I’m going to order a copy of the photos and send them to Seth McFarlane, so he can add them to the “We Saw Your Boobs” song the next time he feels compelled to sing it.