Thursday, February 9, 2012

Which is Worse: Croup or University Courses?

I'm finally over the freaded croup. when I was in second grade, I missed two days of school becuase I had been ill with croup. when I retunred to school, the note my mom wrote said simply that I had been sick. The nosy (or perhaps concerned; I should probably give her he benefit of the doubt) nun who was my teacher that year asked what illness had been. i told her what I was told, which was that I had been sick with croup. The teacher/nun laughed hysterically as though I was Jimmy Kimmel or perhaps John Belushi in his prime. After her fit of laughter subsided, she explained to me that ibnly babies get crup, and that I obviously was no longer a baby and therefore could not have had croup.

Croup doesn't end abruptly in most cases, so at a few points in the day, I treated her and the rest of the class to eveidentiary  barking seal imitations, but still the teacher/nun was neither impressed not convinced of the accuracy of my diagnosis. She wouldn't leave it alone, either. "Exactly who told you you had croup?' she asked me at one point. "Was it your mother or your fahter?" She knew my dad was and is a doctor. I answered thta my dad had provided the digonosis. "Well, I guess it is pretty far from his specialty. Doctors can't be expected to be experts in all areas," she concluded.  I continued to bark like a seal. "What exactly is wrong with you, anyway?" she asked.


"I 'm getting over croup," I again told her. She threw her hands in the air, then went to the intercom and called some other staff member. They presumably discussed what half-wits my parents were. What I heard from the end I could hear was a lot of laughter, the words croup, infancy, and not terribly smart.  My mom eventually had to come to school and pick me up, I had been sent back to school before I was really ready to be there, and at one point my lips turned blue, which is a sign of hypoxia, which is a by-product of croup. i wonder why the nun thought my lips turned blue. She probably thought I had an allergic reaction to something I ate. She probably never connected that barking cough to the blue lips. In any event, miserable as i was, I'm glad i could at least provide a source of merriment to my nun teacher and her nun friends.

Since that time, I've been diagnosed with croup by pediatricians, internists, pulmonologists, and all sorts of specialists, some of them world-renowned, and most with credentials in the specialty far exceeding those held by my father. The most recent diagnosis came about two weeks ago. If I knew the techer/nun's address, I'd send her copies of all my medical reports, although she'd probably just call her nun friends and hoot about how stupid all the specialists are, because everyone who knows anything at all knows only babies can get croup. However imbecilic I feel that they are, I wish they were correct. I could have been spared a lot of  discomfort over the years.

Anyway, I'm out of bed and my nose is firmly attached to the proverbial grindstone. Most assignmets and paper have been completed except for final proofreading and re-printing. I prefer, even though it's a tremendous waste of paper, to proofread hard copies as opposed to scanning for typographical and other errors on a computer screen. Call it a quirk or whatever, but it's much easier for me to miss an error when viewing it in a computer screen.

So this weekend I'm editing and finishing up final projects in addition to completing all required reading. it will be a rough weekend, but following this weekend of drudgery, the rest of the quarter should be smooth sailing. It's a bit tough to do things this way, but I much prefer it. Otherwise, I'd have trouble sleeping for most of the quarter. This way, only the first month is essentially sleepless, although croup and nonacademic nonsense contributed to this weekend overload of work.

As to the question: Would I rather have croup or do work for university courses? Bring on the course workload..




3 comments:

  1. Alexis, yesterday part of my workload consisted of proofreading paper galleys and marking corrections on them with a real red pen.

    Now, I had previously gone through the pages on the computer screen, correcting errors as I found them.

    The pages had then been sent to the production department where they had been set using Apple Macs, who correct mistakes on their screens.

    On the galley copies I still found a number of errors.

    As for that nun? "A little learning is a dangerous thing;
    drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring"

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  2. I'm glad you're doing ok, despite being croupy. I was beginning to worry about you, but I figured that may have been the problem. How is Jillian doing? Is she still in the hospital??

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  3. Feel better :) keep up the good work darling!! ;D

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