In sickness and in health, perils lurk

If you’re like me and 90 million other people, at some point in the last month or two you noticed a little tickle in your throat, took some echinacea (or a margarita and an aspirin) and hoped for the best. Alas, two days later you were coughing so forcefully that old ladies covered their faces in horror and children cried. Nothing for it but to stay home.

When you’re sick, your priorities change.

People whom you might have described as “hot” a week ago are suddenly of zero interest -- unless you think they might be willing to bring you soup. You fantasize about warm, steady pressure ... from a hot water bottle. Soft, delicate strokes ... of a Kleenex.

I not only lost interest in my friends, I lost the ability to feign interest. When a longtime friend called to tell me about a bad breakup, I said something like, “Have you ever coughed so hard you threw up?”

Yet I confess that part of me welcomed the downtime, the enforced retreat from society. Certainly the complete absence of social contact had odd effects. Someone brought me groceries and included a Hollywood gossip magazine; I read every single word of every article, even the ones about people I’d never heard of. Also, I noticed that I started to think of the detectives on “Law & Order” as personal friends of mine.

But I liked the absence of pressure, the safety of spending the day under a blanket.

Has anyone else noticed that life in Southern California is becoming fraught with increasingly weird forms of peril?

When I was 16 and just beginning to date, my biggest fears involved things like burping during a movie. These days, venturing out seems to entail risks of a bizarre nature.

For example, up until February, Times readers probably believed their odds of encountering, say, a 400-pound tiger were quite low. But suppose, in February, you and a date had decided to go hiking in -- oh, I don’t know -- Moorpark. Your chances of being eaten by a tiger would have immediately shot up to “really good.”

And you no doubt read recently that a couple was attacked by a group of chimpanzees. Tiger? Chimps? So all the times I’ve heard people warn single women that “there are some real animals out there,” did I misunderstand? Were they in fact talking about real animals?

A few weeks ago there was an item in the newspaper about a woman who had voluntarily turned over a butcher knife to airport security officers, telling them she’d forgotten about it. When they asked her why she would carry a butcher knife in her purse, she replied that she’d “stuck it in there before a blind date, just in case.”

OK, I have a number of questions.

First, what dating pool is she drawing from? Did she place a personal ad in Soldier of Fortune? Also, is this a trend? I mean, did everyone but me already know that people are now arming themselves for dates? If I say to a man, “Are you happy to see me?” is he going to reply, “No, that’s just a gun in my pocket?”

All things considered, there are worse fates than being home with a cough. I am now well enough to reenter the fray and am venturing forth with neither Uzi nor butcher knife.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be vigilant. I never set foot outside without first using a pair of binoculars to check my kumquat tree for anacondas.

What’s an extra moment or two, in exchange for peace of mind?

Leni Fleming can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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