#068 Getting Sick
Sometimes when writing these things, I try to draw from my own personal life experiences. For example, I make a lot of puns and jokes in my regular interactions with people, which led to my post about banter. When I wrote my post about firemen I had just spoken with a fireman. And when I wrote about the police I had just recently gone police-car surfing. So for today’s post I am once again going to write about something that is directly relevant to my life at the moment. Today we’re going to talk about superhero sick days.
Most superheroes can get sick just like anybody else. There are some very crafty viruses out there that don’t care if your white blood cells have super strength or speed or dancing abilities. So sometimes heroes get the sniffles or the ouchies or debilitating diarrhea and when that happens, you’re allowed to take a day off. Now I know what you’re thinking “but what about my great powers which cause me to have a great responsibility to protect my fellow man and bring about the overall betterment of society!” and to that I say shut up! You’re no good to anybody if you’re diseased. You’re going to get everyone else sick too. Which is fine for supervillains, they deserve to have the flu for a bit. But what good is it if you save an old lady from a purse-snatching (or a full-on-overblown-kill-the-guards-explode-the-vault purse heist) and then she gets like pneumonia or something! So take a day or two to get better. There are other, healthier heroes who can pick up the slack for you. You’re not less of a hero for taking some time for yourself. (I mean granted I’m sick and yet I’m still here typing and teaching away but I’m just made of sterner stuff than the average superhero.)
Another reason to take some time off from fighting crime when you get sick is that some diseases can have unexpected side-effects on a superhero’s powers. They can weaken or alter them in ways that might cause going about your regular day to be challenging. But that’s ok because you’re taking a day off from fighting crime, remember? This shouldn’t be a problem. Unless you’re trying to heat up some soup with your powers but your cold has turned your heat powers into cold powers. Then just use a microwave.
When you get sick with a normal human everybody-gets-these-the-word-common-is-even-in-the-name diseases you should not take up the valuable time of your underground superhero doctor buddy. There’s just no need. Make a regular appointment with a regular doctor. Your underground superhero doctor buddy has more important things to worry about. They’re busy stitching up waist-to-sternum sword wounds or sticking band-aids on sparking robot arms, they don’t have to time to be handing out Tylenol to slightly under the weather superheroes. So you’re going to have to go to a regular person doctor. Probably you’ll even have to make your own appointment, like an adult. You’ve arm-wrestled with sentient squids from the depths of the Arctic Ocean, you should be able to handle that. When you get to the regular person doctor’s office you may have to wait in the waiting room for a bit. Lots of people get sick. It happens. Be cool about it. Don’t show up in your costume and demand priority treatment because everybody there owes you their lives several times over. Nobody’s going to think you’re cool if you do that. Everyone’s going to hate you.
If, however, your ailment is not of the run-of-the-mill (run-of-the-pill?) variety and instead is the kind that only plagues superhumans or other para-folk (such as for example, zombie-chickenpox or Glomphas from the Rigel System flu) you may not be able to find a doctor who can properly treat you on Earth. Traveling through space while diseased can be very risky so I recommend trying to get a space doctor to come to you. This can be very costly so I suggest saving the life of a space doctor early in your career. This way when you get sick they’ll owe you a favor. (Also, you should send a sample of the alien virus to some Earth doctors so they can try to develop some means of treating you in the future.)
Some super-diseases can only be cured by shrinking your super-friends down and sending them inside your body to fight the disease and make you well again. This might seem incredibly strange but it happens often enough that it bears covering here. When selecting people to go inside your body to beat up a disease you should pick people who you trust and who are level-headed and can keep their cool under pressure. Probably also one of them should be a doctor or scientist or someone with some understanding of how the human body works (possibly an elementary school science teacher with a magical bus would work). You should also make sure that none of the people who go inside you are armed with real weapons. Remember, they’re fighting a disease not tiny super villains (in most cases) there’s no need to bring a machine gun or a laser sword. Weapons should be of the medical variety, antibiotic plasma rifles, morphine blasters, stuff like that. If somebody accidentally brings an actual dangerous weapon with them inside another person’s body that weapon should remain sheathed or holstered the entire time. You can’t fire a gun or whip out a sword inside somebody’s body. That’s dangerous. Somebody could die. It’s also important for these tiny people to remember that not everything that attacks them is bad and should be attacked back. You are a foreign body; the entire immune system is most likely going to come down on you. Don’t destroy anything except for the disease. The last thing you want is for the person you’re inside of to die. Being inside a living person is one thing but being inside of a dead person who you also might have accidentally killed is just disgusting and wrong.
People get sick, it’s just a fact of life and when they do they need to rest. So if you’re a superhero and you get sick get off the streets, get into bed, watch a movie, eat some soup, and just rest and relax until you’re feeling better. Then when you get better you can fight crime to your heart’s content. You can even fight some extra crime to make up for when you were sick. You don’t have too. But you certainly can.
