It was early August. We were on our way to church when I started feeling woozy. I pulled over and Laura drove home. I went right upstairs, put on wool socks, a hooded sweatshirt and jogging pants before crawling under the covers. It was 82 degrees in the bedroom but I was icy cold.
I don’t get that sick very often, but when I do my fevered mind starts to believe that dying might be a better outcome than enduring the extreme discomfort of food poisoning or the flu – whichever that was. I stayed in bed that day and the next – muscles aching, fever burning, guts rumbling. I slept a lot. The suffering melted away when I slept.
And as I laid there, my mind drifted to work and a few of the complex business problems I’d been wresting with for weeks. It might have been the single-minded, focused attention or maybe it was the sickness-spawned creativity, but I actually came up with solid solutions for some of the issues that had been plaguing us for months.
Fever-broken, weak-kneed and still a little queezy from malnourishment, I made it back to work on Tuesday. I told my boss about the solutions I’d come up with to which he responded, “You should get sick more often. Those are great suggestions. There’s nothing like an out of the box idea derived from a fever induced hallucination!”