Just sit tight.

It’s one of my least favorite phrases in the world, almost on par with “no,” “don’t touch that” and “I’m just not that into you.”

However, with all of those phrases I am able to cease one action and move onto another. When someone says “no,” I move onto something else. When someone says, “Taylor! Don’t touch that!” I quickly back away. When someone says, “I’m just not that into you,” I buy a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and watch Rom-Com’s until the hurt subsides and then move on with my life.

But, “just sit tight” requires and asks for no response. None. It requires an action from someone else… just not you.

Just “sitting tight” isn’t something that I’m particularly good at.

Case in point- I woke up Monday morning feeling like I had bad sushi and like a small elf was squeezing some organ as hard as he could in my left back. However, I pushed it aside, bought some Tylenol and went to work, where I somehow managed to throw up everything I had eaten that morning within the first hour of being there and couldn’t stand up straight as hard as I tried.

I went home, where I somehow managed to make it to the bathroom fast enough to get the last part of my morning meal out of my body and made it to the couch where I determined I was going to die. However, not wanting to die, I managed to find my way to an urgent care without vommitting or crying (small wins) where after the medical aid asked some very personal questions and tested my urine, told the doctor that I had a kidney infection. At that point, that sounded doable- I would just get some antibiotics, maybe a strong pain medication, and go back to work, right?

Wrong.

The very nice pregnant doctor kindly told me that I would have to stay in the hospital room for an hour and a half to be treated with fluids, antibiotics, and anti-nausea medication.

After trying to talk her into maybe just giving me a pill, or that I was actually joking with her and was fine, she still put a needle in my arm, had the nurse hook me up to the fluid things, closed the curtain and said “just sit tight”.

At that point, there was nothing else really to do because I was terrified that if I moved my arm, there’d be blood everywhere and the only thing worse than a needle in your arm is taking a needle out of your arm and have blood come out.

So I “sat tight”.

The first couple minutes were rough… I texted, snapchatted, checked out Instagram and Pinterest, trying to find something that I could fill my time with.

But after thirty minutes, I finished that and tried to think of some other way to fill my time.

That’s when I realized that I was crazy. I was given so much time to just rest, something I hadn’t really been able to do since my return from Africa, and instead of just sitting tight and resting – which my body clearly was wanting – I was too busy doing the opposite.

So I gave in. I put my phone down, closed my eyes, and literally “sat tight,” because of the weird incline the bed I was in had.

And all of a sudden I wasn’t in control and I didn’t have to be. I couldn’t control my kidneys and I definitely couldn’t control how fast the IV thing would take. My only task was to “sit tight” and let my body (and the antibiotics, fluids and anti-nausea medication) heal.

I think that so many times, we are given the opportunity to “sit tight” and give up control for the time being to heal ourselves, whether it be our bodies,minds, souls or lives, and instead when given those opportunities, we try to fix them ourselves, putting on a temporary band-aid that we pretend is as good as stitches.

At some point, the band aid needs to come off and we need the stitches. And when we get the stitches, we have to sit tight.

I still strongly dislike that phrase, but what I dislike more is being sick, or being unable to do the things that I love most in the world, because I tried to heal myself with Tylenol, or a temporary fix, instead of taking the time to just “sit tight” and let something else do something instead.