Dave T's Pros and Cons of Stuff Everyone Has: Sickness

Have you ever had a cold? The flu? A sinus infection? Cancer? A coma? Measles? Mumples? Chicken Pox? Malaria? Bubonic plague? Leprosy? Diarrhea? Chlamydia?*

If you have, then you’ve experienced SICKNESS.

Don’t know what it is?

For the purposes of this article, sickness will include any somewhat incapacitating malady, including headaches, burns, wounds, and sprained ankles. Any pain or infirmity taking place in or on your body. This does not include mental illness.

Pros:

• Thanks to sickness, we have sick days. If we didn’t have sick days, we couldn’t take sick days when we’re not sick to do fun things like go snowboarding or just stay home and watch reruns of Too Close for Comfort all day. (Oh, Monroe, you never cease to tickle my funny bone!)

• If you have someone to take care of you, it’s nice to lie in bed all day and have someone bring you saltines and ginger ale in a cup with a bendy straw. If you have a strong maternal instinct, it makes you feel good to take care of someone else when they’re under the weather. It’s a win-win.

• Without sickness, the Perfect Attendance Award would be even more meaningless than it is now.

• Without sickness, there would be no doctors and nurses. That means a whole industry is gone, a vocation really, and along with it hot doctors and sexy nurses. Consider the possibility that you could projectile vomit at some point in your life as a tax that you pay for the possibility that your lady friend will buy a slutty nurse’s outfit from a costume shop and give you the sponge bath of your life.

• As a kid, I really loved the taste of that bubble-gum flavored amoxicillin.

• Sometimes sickness is your body’s way of saying, “Hey, slow down, man, you’re gonna poop out at this rate!”

• Without sickness, we wouldn’t have the Christopher Walken gem, “I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cow bell.”

• Sometimes the sleep you get from codeine or Nyquil is the best sleep you’ve had in years.

• Sometimes girls who have sweet, bright voices get these amazingly sexy, raspy, Jessica Rabbit voices when they’re sick.

Total Pros: 9

Cons:

• Being sick means you might miss something important. The big game. The dance. The concert. The day they give away free fanny packs at the baseball stadium. The public caning of a kid who picked on you in high school who got arrested in Singapore for stealing a stick of gum (assuming you flew out to Singapore to see it and then got sick).

• Vaccines are a good thing, but they mean getting stuck with needles. No one likes needles. You either just kinda dislike them or are so afraid of them it makes you sweat blood.

• Sickness usually involves some degree of pain or discomfort. Maybe you feel all dry inside, or worse, all gooey. Aches, stiff muscles, hot clammy things, things that make you moan like a sea lion trapped in a net. STDs make your genitals hurt.

• The pharmaceutical industry is an evil empire whose ridiculous rates are surpassed only by college tuition. Without sickness, we could get rid of those evil bastards. The healthcare industry can go tickle my butthole while we’re at it. (If there’s any confusion, tickling my butthole is meant here as a bad thing.)

• Sick kids make me sad.

• A lot of sicknesses lead to death, and that blows.

• Hospital food is gross.

• Men whine a lot about being sick. And then women have to hear them whine.

• Some sicknesses lead to permanent damage. Like kids in the olden times who blew an eardrum from whooping cough and were partially deaf the rest of their lives. Or kids who picked their pox and got pock marks.

• If you had any siblings, and one of them got chicken pox as a kid, you were forced to play with him. I get that it was to make sure I didn’t get shingles as an adult, but it sucked for me because my brother and I weren’t exactly buds as kids like we are now, so it was like torture. “Oh, oh, okay, so, I have to play with Mark, who’s probably gonna beat me up if I win whatever horsesh*t we’re playing, and then when I’m done I get to sit in a tub of oatmeal wearing oven mitts for a week as my reward? Great. Perfect. Thanks.” (I’m just glad it ended there. What if our parents did that to us our whole lives? “Yeah, David, your brother’s got the Hep C, why don’t you share needles with him the next time you chase the dragon?”)

Total Cons: 10

So, 9 pros, 10 cons. It's close, but I think we can get rid of sickness once and for all. You might think this would make our lives too easy, but you’re forgetting about all of the other awful things we have to deal with on a daily basis. Like, people, to name one.

‘Til next time, Ciao!

Dave T

*Did you spot the made up ailment? It was Mumples!

Dave Terruso is half of the sketch comedy duo Animosity Pierre.