I have a cold.

I don’t like being sick. Years of dealing with excruciating headaches have left me unable to cope with feeling less than ideal. I like to be comfortable and will get easily distracted by painful days.

I avoid illness as best I can, but won’t muster the energy to stay away from sick people or infected objects. I’m young and healthy – getting a cold isn’t likely to kill me, so I opt not to offend someone by avoiding all contact and refusing to touch objects that may be carrying their germs.

Occasionally, this strategy lands me feeling iffy, acting as head cheerleader for my immune system and hoping it can fight off the onset of symptoms – stuffy nose, cloudy head, coughing, draining ickiness. Despite all my internal encouragement, I think my white cells have declared mutiny and are going to punish me by allowing disease to set in.

So I scoff at my internal system of disease-fighting, and turn to Tylenol Cold and Nyquil, who will support me in my time of need. Tylenol Cold is responsible for the vague haze that comes between my thoughts and their expression. I’m going to try to avoid taking more medicine for another hour, then I’ll drift off into a drugged sleep.

In truth, I’m almost grateful for feeling badly at this particular time – it provides a much needed excuse for why I’m lacking any kind of motivation lately. When things were going badly at work, I craved writing here, trying to create some sort of audience for these words, but more than that, wanting to put something out there. But now? I feel … not much.

Projects are piling up at work – I’m meeting people and starting to see some collaborative opportunities heading my way. That’s a huge relief, and a source of excitement. These are good, clinically-oriented problems where I think we can make progress. I feel that I have some applicable skills and also could learn from the people and projects. So it’s ideal! Yay! Except…I feel more blah.

I got a note from one of the volunteer organizations too. I offered to tutor math and they seem excited about my interest and subsequent application. It took me 2 days to reply to her email, though I sincerely do want to help. But like at work, problems pile up and I begin to doubt whether I’ll make a difference.

I love to read, and adore romance novels. I like the happy endings – men and women coming together, forming a life, facing problems, and coming out OK. My method is to review the back of the book – get a reminder of characters and conflict, then read a couple chapters. I want to make sure I have an idea of what’s going on. Then I skip to the end.

I can’t help it! I want to know what happens – make sure everything concludes nicely before I invest hours delving into the whole story. Then I can savor the characters, tear up when circumstances are painful, giggle over misunderstandings, content in my knowledge that love conquers all these tiny problems.

I attend a number of tumor board meetings. Normally, it’s great to listen to people talk about some of these cases – and many times, this conversation can lead to some interesting insights that I hope help a particular person. But in one case, doctors had tried a number of treatments, and the tumor continued to grow. Spreading out, pushing aside healthy tissue, apparently becoming increasingly progressive over time. As doctors continued to list their failed treatment attempts, someone finally said “It looks like all you’re doing is pissing it off.”

For me, I keep trying to find ways to motivate myself. Write in the blog! I think. It will help track your progress and inspire you to do more, meet more people, collect more stories you can share.

Oh! Or get involved with more projects – different cancer types, different patient populations, animal studies - all sorts of experiments which will encourage me to work harder in the variety of opportunities I have encountered. My ennui only grew stronger though, so I kept searching.

Read other blogs and see how amazing other people are. Didn’t work so well.

Exercise more and hope the boost in metabolism provides a boost in productivity.

But, alas, all I seem to be doing for that part of my brain that makes me excited, productive and busy? Pissing it off. I’m tired of writing! I can’t think of stories! It responds when I consider composing new posts. I continue to start writing, but fizzle when I reach the middle, letting half-finished documents settle on the screen of my laptop.

My brain sighs with dismay when I continue to line up things to do in various areas. We tried that in grad school, it reminds me. Some of them won’t work, we won’t get credit for others, and the few that make it will be slowly picked apart by peer review. Why bother?

Other people have things figured out – reading about them – their syllabi for classes I have no desire to teach, achieving tenure I don’t think I want, getting publications, interviewing for jobs better than the one I accepted – just makes me feel inadequate at times.

Exercise is fine, but don’t do too much. We need to reserve adequate time for watching mindless TV (The Bachelor’s in Paris! Gilmore Girls might be new tomorrow night! I’m newly addicted to Project Runway!) and taking naps.

So this disease offers a more palatable excuse for me. I don’t have to wonder why I continue to be stuck, in spite of my strong efforts to push forward out of my little rut. I'm sick. The glimmer of success – of optimizing treatment for patients, receiving some recognition for good work, of helping younger scientists as they work their way through what can be a difficult training process – encourages me. It pulls at me more strongly than all the tricks I’ve tried to use to motivate myself.

The hope that this is all going somewhere – that if you flipped ahead and read the last chapters in the story of my career, you’d smile and leave a comment that says “I’ve seen the end, and you’ll be fine. Just hang in there.” That's what will make me bundle up tomorrow, pack up the Kleenex and cough medicine, and head off to work. For better or worse, this is what I do right now and I want to do it well. Apparently that desire extends to in sickness and health as well.