Take Good Care of Yourself

Are you still alive if you are sick? The answer is clearly yes, although it often doesn't feel like it, and many times you wish you weren't. But drive on any highway and you will see those ominous blue signs imprinted with the letter H, and we all know that stands for "hospital," a building specifically erected to house the sick, so we must assume there are plenty of them in every town across this great nation, enough to support a huge staff of doctors, nurses, radiologists, administrators, janitors, cooks and assorted hangers-on.

I spent the better, or actually worse, part of this week being sick -- getting blood drawn, having my heart monitored, breathing in and out while people listened to my insides through a stethoscope -- and I am here to tell you that healthy is better, so if you are not sick now I beg you to do anything you can think of to not get sick.

Much of illness is in our control, except things like Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), or Stone Man Syndrome, where God forbid a million times you wake up one day and your bones have turned to stone, but that is an extremely rare connective tissue disease caused by a mutation of the body's repair mechanism which causes fibrous tissue, including muscles, tendons, and ligaments, to be ossified either spontaneously or when damaged.

FOP aside, staying health requires eating only healthy foods, no smoking cigarettes of course, no ingesting harmful drugs or copious amounts of alcohol, and for you severely broken people who live in remote Alaskan towns or Labrador, absolutely no sniffing of gasoline. And certainly get plenty of sleep and exercise, and eat bananas. (Something about the potassium.) Good luck!