I got sick last week, and my left tonsil turned into a lake of flaming pain. When I finally limped into the urgent care Sunday afternoon both the nurse and the doctor did that little medical flinch when they looked in my throat, both indicating “that’s quite, uh, inflamed.” Which is the professional way of saying damn, your throat is on fire.

I had a fever, which is unusual for me, since I usually run to a reptilian chill in the body temperature department. The fever made me stupid, too stupid to realize in the moment how impaired I was.

The doctor’s office told me how much Tylenol and Advil I could take for the pain in a 24-hour period. I did the basic math to see how much I could have in the time from sunup to sundown but I calculated a “day” as 36 hours, not 24. Which meant I was woefully undermedicated, febrile and jolted awake by the pain of any reflexive swallowing I did in my sleep.

Had I understood my lack of capacity, I could easily have asked my husband to do the math, or called my daughter, who is a registered nurse, to check the dosage. I did neither, blinded to my stupidity by the very factors causing the stupidity.

I figured it out once I had some antibiotics on board, and the fever had passed. Although I can’t vouch for the full return of my brain functioning – there’s a reason I’m writing a substack rather than the client proposal that is also due.

So, I’ve been thinking about the illusions we believe are real because of a lack of capacity and the ways those can damage us.

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