ALMOST CARRIE ~ Bellyaching

Downtown, Samantha woke up to discover that she did have it all, including the flu.

—Sex and the City (Season 3, Episode 10—”All or Nothing”)

Last Saturday morning I woke up right as rain, excited to spend the day GSD (the acronym my husband and I use for “getting shit done”). Twenty minutes after I got out of bed, I got back in with a funny feeling in my stomach.  Ten minutes after that, I threw up, struck down with an intense and unwieldy stomach flu that lasted, not the requisite 24 hours, but a full 48.  After the first round of vomiting, I insisted that it was simply a fluke and that my husband proceed with his plans to play video games at a friend’s apartment in Queens, to which he replied he would wait a while in order make sure that I was truly alright.  After the second round of vomiting, we had the conversation again verbatim.  After the third round, I conceded that I probably did have a bug, my husband called his friend to cancel, and I gave in to the wallowing splendor of being disgustingly, deliriously sick.

It was at this point that my friendly husband, who had been so kind when I was still insisting I was fine, began his inevitable descent into a jaw-clenching, eye-rolling, huge-sighing jerk. He carried out his nursing duties with an increasingly nasty chip on his shoulder—slamming around the kitchen as he filled my glass of ginger ale, spitting out a tortured “Why?” when I asked him to bring me a teaspoon (because my mother told me to sip teaspoonfuls of water, that’s why!), needling me when I threw up in the trash can by the bed instead of in the toilet.  (When my husband read this, he had a different take—”I only started to get cranky after you bossed me around for ten hours straight.”).

This behavior was nothing new.  My husband and I have been arguing about our differing sick-time rituals ever since we met.  He doesn’t like, for example, how I moan and groan.  He says it sounds like I’m a bad actor in a bad movie, that no one in real life makes those kinds of guttural noises, that my melodrama is out of control.  He says that I revert to childhood, morphing from a grown woman into a little girl, becoming needy in ways that go beyond what are reasonable for an adult with the flu.  I say that this is insane, that perhaps this is some bizarre reaction to a repressed trauma from his own childhood or the result of faking sick too many times to get out of school and his mother—smelling a rat—refusing to coddle.  I myself never faked sick, and so when I actually am, I maintain that it is my basic human right to whine, cry, groan, and ask for certain pillows to be positioned around me in a circular pattern.  It is perhaps the ONLY time when it is perfectly acceptable and not at all creepy to act like a little girl.

I was thinking about Samantha in all this, situated in her beautiful new condo that she bought all by herself, sick as a dog and helpless.  She demands her mother’s “cure-all childhood remedy”—cough syrup and Fanta over ice.  Carrie works the blender while Samantha, glassy-eyed and disoriented, blubbers away.  Carrie then leans over and blows Samantha’s nose in what is perhaps Carrie’s most maternal gesture of the series.  “Oh Carrie,” Samantha sobs, “It doesn’t matter how much you have, if you don’t have a guy who cares about you, it don’t mean shit.”

Well Samantha—I’m here to tell you that when it comes to being sick, even if you DO have a guy who cares about you, it don’t mean shit.  Even the good ones, even the fabulous ones like my husband, can be lousy at certain things.  Just like the cough syrup and Fanta, I have certain needs—the bendy straws my father used to nick from McDonald’s so I wouldn’t have to lift my head, for example, and the round of Go Fish my mother always suggested to take my mind off the fever.  Committed relationship or no, sometimes we really are all alone.  If we’re really lucky, there’s a Carrie in our lives to blend us drinks or, better yet, a mother and father sitting in rapt attention as we moan and groan into the telephone.

Toasting to "having it all" the night before Samantha comes down with the flu.

Emily Sproch is a writer and a “Sex and the City” tour guide.  Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”