When H1N1 crashes your retirement party

I left the office building in which I had spent the best part of 32 years of my life Friday. I reached the parking lot and bent double, wracked in a coughing spasm that re-awakened my bruised ribs from a fall three weeks earlier; straining to breathe, the sweat rushing to my face, the bile rising in my throat, the tears springing unwillingly to my eyes.

Not an emotional response...although I was prepared for one...but a physical admission that I was sick; that despite my willingness to give it one more try, one last day, my body was telling me what my brain already knew. Elvis truly had left the building.

My body, or at least my unconscious, seemed to intuit this a day earlier. Thursday I awoke feeling that my oft-abused lungs had been filled with Jello overnight. Okay, a loose cough but still juicy. By the time I made it out of the shower, it was obvious that the couch was as far as I would journey that day. I just had no energy. And I needed some energy to drag myself in for the final luncheon, the congratulations, the best wishes, the hugs the following day.

So Friday, I went off to my last day in the mines, trying not to cough on any co-workers and quietly blaming the person in the office next to me for sharing her cold. And I largely carried it off..."no, no, it's not H1N1, merely so-and-so's cold..."

Friday evening, family and friends ganged up on me.

"Your eyes are red and puffy. Your skin is hot to the touch. You appear muddled. You're not well, are you?"

No, it didn't take a flu clinic to tell me (what are friends for?) that on this day of all days on which I wanted to be in top form--to be at my best--I ended up feeling as sick as I had in a decade.

The mental health experts say there are a very few things that stress you more than these few life events--the birth of a child, getting married, the death of a child or partner, or retiring from a long career. What my conscious brain had rejected, my unconscious brain had proven with symbolism and physicality that could not be ignored. Damn brain! It had robbed me of my ability to sail smoothly through a final stressful situation; to laugh off, one last time, the pressures in the face of which I had made a career of remaining unflappable.

Gee, I know this to be true...because the boss, even calling me "friend", told my co-workers this in his speech. And yet, all the while, that finely honed social conscience that had so carefully guided my every action through three decades, was screaming "Are you nuts? Are you exposing those who you love and admire, who carry forward your life's work, to the much-hyped and much-dreaded swine flu?"

In retrospect, the answer--to my shame--appears to be "yes". So with my thank you cards will go an apology. Too late, perhaps, but it just proves I was more human than I, or my boss and co-workers were prepared to admit.

Not the send-off we had planned, but I am content to live with this little irony that convoluted my last day at work, and accept it as one more proof that it was time to go.