July 01, 2009

8:44 p.m.

And Then I Got Swine Flu

So I didn't go to work Monday. I finished up at the apartment -- scrubbed the fridge, got the remaining boxes of CDs out of the basement, mopped the floors. Then Marc asked if I would help him haul stuff back and forth with the pickup truck. We went to the house they're selling and loaded out boxes and boxes of canning jars, the kind with the hinged lids and the rubber stoppers. Marc is very big on canning tomatoes, and we're actually going to try next year to can or blanch/freeze all the vegetables we'll need for the entire winter, from our acre of farm. So we did that, picked up pallets, and put all into my basement. On the way we found two free, working fans on the roadside with signs saying "Free, works." They were wonderful big square fans, the older kind still made of metal. Since I have a bit of seepage in the back of my basement from the rains, we applied them right away. Then we loaded the truck again with a lot of debris which they'd taken out of the basement before, and we got it all except two gross, now-wet mattresses. I can put out three big items for trash on the 2nd sunday of each month here and they'll take them away. So those will go this month along with a broken bureau.

I was feeling rather poorly by the end... tired... a little achy. I'd worked so hard the last bunch of days.

I commenced scrubbing the bathroom. Lots of bleach-containing ingredients, HazMat gloves. Pretty soon I realized that the corroded, petrified matter on the toilet seat was ancient poo, and not worth trying to chisel off. Off I went to Home Depot and snagged a nice, clean, cheap plastic one to replace it with. After switching that out and scrubbing the rest of the toilet and the sink as much as I could, at least I though if I really had to, I could use the bathroom without contracting the plague.

The rest of the bathroom is disgusting, of course; the floor, the inside of the door which is almost black from grime, the walls. It's not exactly a pleasant place to be. Or to pee. But... the toilet seat is sparkly.

I also put down ant bait.

After that I simply could not do another thing. Man, was I tired.

I went to bed that night, woke up in the wee hours feeling man, more achy than I expected. Went to work Tuesday and felt rotton all day. Must be fighting something off. Yeah, I'm sure I'm fighting off something. The day dragged and so did I. I got through it somehow...

Ate dinner with the family and didn't have much appetite. Just out of curiosity, took my temp about 8:30. 101.8! Hey, no wonder I'd felt crappy all day. I went to bed.

...and woke up about 1:00 or so with major chills. Rose calls it Shake & Bake when you have a fever and tremors so bad you can't keep all the muscles in your body from contracting. I hadda pee really bad, so I got myself up, but I was shaking like a leaf and couldn't get my teeth unclenched. I was so hot and so cold. I took some more Advil and managed to get back to sleep eventually. In the course of the night I think I sweated through 4 sets of jammies. I and my bed were drenched this morning. Needless to say I didn't go to work.

I felt better for about an hour this morning when I finally did rise, long enough to agree to go with Rose on some much needed errands as long as she drove. I had to straighten out my address with the Post Office -- apparently there has NEVER been an actual mailbox for my house. Old Man got his mail at a Rural Route address directly from the P.O. When I've tried to change my address in a couple of places online, including the usps site, it's said the street number isn't recognized! So I had to fill out a little card and talk to them about making sure stuff comes to me. They're very nice there -- I spoke yesterday with the carrier herself, know her by name now -- and the clerk at the P.O. today turned out to be one of Rose's patients. I love a small town.

By the time we'd hit the bank we still had several big errands to do, and I was starting to feel a little achy again, so mostly I closed my eyes and tried to find a comfortable place for my head and stayed in the car. You can't get comfortable when you have a fever, period. I did go into WalMart -- I don't love shopping there but Rose had prescriptions to pick up, and I needed shampoo and other things, and I wasn't going to be picky about where we went. WalMart is even bigger and brighter and more vast when there's a gyroscope of fever behind your eyes that won't stop spinning. I just moseyed slowly wherever I had to go, and tried not to touch anything.

That's the other thing -- hello, SWINE FLU, or whatever type A flu this turns out to be, you don't want to go spreading it around. I was very careful not to get close to folks and to keep my hands clean. The only reason I went, really, was that I didn't want Rose to have to do my errands. She's getting over it by now but is still weak and doesn't have a lot of stamina.

Her office did scrounge a 5-day course of Tamiflu for me, by digging into the way back of their samples closet. It costs $100 for ten tablets if you don't have insurance, so buying it was out of the question. They get many kudos for coming up with them. So that was one thing we picked up.

Everything else took way longer than we hoped, so we didn't get back until after 5pm. By then my body was screaming to get back into bed. I gathered the sheets I'd washed from last night, managed to get them onto the bed, and lay down for a while.

It was too hot.

I got up and turned on the fan and went back to bed.

It was too hot.

I changed to a camisole type top and went back to bed.

It was too hot.

I took off my jammy bottoms and went back to bed.

It was less hot but I was still sweating. My hair hurt. Pillows that, moments ago, had been stuffed with fluffy polyfiberfill, suddenly were filled with bricks. Where was that cool spot again? Nevermind cool, where's the soft spot?

After a while Marc came up to tell me it was time to go lay phone cable at House, but that I could eat dinner first. I think he hadn't caught on that I actually had THE FLU yet. He was surprised when I wasn't ready to go to work at 7 this morning, even knowing I'd had a high fever last night. God bless him -- it's not that he ain't brilliant, but mild Aspergers sometimes keeps him from connecting the dots. We sort of hammered him into a corner at dinner over all this, and I think he finally got it. I'm not going to lay phone wires tonight, I'm not going to work tomorrow, and I'm contagious so I shouldn't be among my coworkers anyway. (Yeah, I know, I went into WalMart, but I was careful and it was a necessary inconvenience.)

I did eat dinner, and then retired again to finally check email and gear down to go to bed. I do hope within a couple of days the fever goes down and stays down. Thank God for Advil, and thank God my body waited until I was moved.

All is good, despite the spinning.