Dr. Giulia Enders

Whenever I am sick, I catastrophize.

I'm like, I'm going to be sick forever.

It's terrible.

I also complain immensely about the fact that my body is letting me down.

Why am I feeling like this?

I can't do everything I want, which I think is learned behavior from my upbringing.

What should I be doing instead?

The nice thing about being sick, or well, it's not a nice thing, but it's the good to know thing, I would say, is that all these things you're experiencing, for the most part, don't come from the germ that's infecting you.

The sore throat, the runny nose, the cough, the fever even.

The microbe or the virus doesn't do that.

It's not coming from the infection?

No.

No, because it would really like to live there unnoticed.

And that would be the best case for it if no one bothered and it could just be there and do its thing.

But who bothers is our immune system.

It's saying, oh, I don't like the way this special microbe is treating my cells.

I'm against that.

I don't think it's a good match.

So we should, you know, divide this up here.

And in that case, it'll start popping some of the throat cells to get those out that have the virus in, and then protecting the cells around to not get the virus from the virus spreading.