How I Stayed Sane During a Month of Pneumonia

I’ve been scarce around here for the last month due to a nasty bout with pneumonia that stuck me in the hospital for a couple of days and stuck at home resting for even more days. This enforced laziness was incredibly boring, especially since I was so blanked out on medicine that I couldn’t focus enough to do anything productive, from working on content  for Dorkadia to playing any game that required me to follow instructions.

Over my month of illness I did my best to come up with a variety of ways to pass the time after I could no longer sleep and was able to temporarily make sure my lungs didn’t get coughed up.

TV

Despite the fact that part of my job here is recommending entertainment for people to consume, I myself am really bad at watching/reading/playing/etc anything that has been too heavily hyped (e.g.; Venture Brothers, much to the disgust of most of my friends). Thusly when my BFF Liam aggressively recommended I watch BBC’s Sherlock while sick (“BITCH YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH.”), I was pretty hesitant. A combination of trust in Liam (the only person to openly agree with me that Jaime Lannister would be at his best riding a unicorn as Brienne’s spirit guide) and incredible boredom pushed me to pull up the series on Amazon Prime.

This ended up being one of my better choices while sick, right up there with finally going to the doctor and teaching my husband how to make a proper grilled cheese sandwich. It turns out Sherlock is not only a really great show, it’s an amazing way to pass the time because OH MY GOD those episodes are long. I was very confused when I saw there were only three episodes per season, but when the first episode NEVER ENDED I started to understand why. Each episode is more like a movie than a TV episode, which lets the show do a ton of stuff with the passage of time and character development that I found really thought-provoking and interesting.

Other TV I watched included the return of Once Upon a Time, which remains one of the most ridiculous shows I’ve ever seen and I can’t stop watching. I also re-watched a ton of Parks and Recreation, which might be the best TV show to help get you through tough times since Scrubs went off the air and never came back for a 9th season shut up.

Comics

I still managed to get my comic book fix over the month by insisting my husband check my pull box on my normal weekly schedule, which is shivering on the sidewalk outside the comic store every Wednesday, begging for Matt Fraction dialog instead of quarters.

I also used this time to ignore my morals and listen to the tiny Devil-Megan on my shoulder and downloaded a bunch of comics. My goal was to read everything with Kid Loki in it, which I pretty much achieved, and gained a new favorite comic book writer in the process.

Kieron Gillen’s work on Journey into Mystery might be one of my favorite runs ever, and his “Mother” arc of Young Avengers is really excellent. I’m sure this is old news to anybody who’s been following Marvel while I wasn’t, but if like me, you missed much of Marvel post-Civil War and you prefer stuff going on at the outer edges of the Marvel ‘verse, these are really great stories to read. Related, Loki: Agent of Asgard continues to be awesome. Issue #2 mentions the heartbreaking end of the Kid Loki arc of Journey into Mystery specifically, which is a big plot point that was neglected in Loki issue #1.

I also recommend Burn the Orphanage, which has a weird name and a weirder aesthetic, but is really enjoyable and quite pretty. Burn the Orphanage is pretty much a story set inside of a beat ‘em up sidescroller. The first run is a 3 issue mini-series which tells the story of Rock, the survivor of a massive orphanage fire, and his quest to track down and punish the man responsible. For an episodic three issue run, Burn is surprisingly dense, fitting a lot of roaring rampage of revenge, characterization and development and plot into its pages. It’s entirely enjoyable and I’ll be subscribing to its soon to be monthly follow up series.

Games

The only game I played during this time was Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which my husband gifted me just before I was stuck in the hospital. New Leaf was the highlight of my hospital stay, only rivaled by the moment I finally got some pants to wear under my open-backed hospital gown (seriously I didn’t get pants until day two of my stay).

I’ve played a lot of Animal Crossing over the years and I very specifically didn’t purchase New Leaf because I knew if I did, my life would descend into nothing but obsessively improving my town, stalking my villagers and constantly rearranging and redecorating my house.

I wasn’t wrong.

New Leaf is a great entry into the Animal Crossing series. It’s certainly not groundbreaking, but it does improve on some things like Town Fund items in City Folk by turning them into a big part of town improvement as Public Works Projects. I regret not buying this game earlier, but I’m pretty sure since my husband has yelled at me for playing at 3am after having already played for five hours straight, I’m the only one regretting it.

Twitch Plays Pokemon

My first night in the hospital, I was woken up every two hours for various medicines and couldn’t bend my left arm thanks to an hastily placed IV from my admission through the ER (my nurses were all amazing but that IV got placed like the ER nurse was angry at my veins and possibly had been sipping my VERY STRONG cough syrup). I was tired, worried and couldn’t sleep at all, so I finally did the only think I could think of to comfort myself – I pulled out my phone and watched AJDNNW run into trees for three hours.

My pneumonia coincided almost perfectly with Twitch Plays Pokemon, allowing me to immerse myself in one of the most interesting social experiments mixed with gaming that’s ever been undertaken on the web. My husband and I watched a lot of stream events (the battles against the Elite Four, the journey of the ledge) together and kept a running commentary yelled across our apartment. I threw TPP memes at anybody who would talk to me about it for more than 30 seconds. I consumed fanworks way more than I was able to consume food.

I love TPP so much that I recently volunteered to help write a Twitch Plays Pokemon dating sim.

I’m not sure what about this…game?…social experiment?…happening?…enthralls me so much. I think it’s a mix of things: we work together or we REALLY don’t and still we somehow progress. We argue about democracy and anarchy with the fervor of zealots and the irony of hipsters. We create a religion and a crazy intricate lore where everything is canon. We play this game together and even the trolls are an accepted and celebrated part of it.

It could also just be that though I was very sick, it was really comforting to watch two Pokemon trainers having a much worse time than I was. Thanks, Red and A.J.

Other highlights of my pneumonia month:

Megan covered the whiteboard in my hospital room with penises. These remained for my entire stay and all of the nurses refused to acknowledge that they were penises.

I was too out of it to remember to switch from my personal email to my professional email when communicating with my office. My personal email is not only an inside joke, it’s a 8 year old inside joke from World of Warcraft. It took a few emails to convince my boss it was me.

I accidentally (somewhat more than) doubled my dose of very strong prescription cough syrup right before watching Frozen. I thought the entire movie was the adventures of Marshmallow (the big scary snowman) and that he was a surprisingly excellent singer.