the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

Or in the ear. Or bladder. 

BLUF: Imma be ok. The worst is past. 

I had the real, full-blown flu once in my life. I came down with it on New Year's Day 2000. 

I'd had flu shots before, and I'd come down with symptoms, yeah. But I didn't know what the flu was until 1 January 2000 (when I had no health insurance). The flu and I became intimate over the next couple of weeks. I routinely ran temps of 102-104 F. I was so weak that I had to crawl to the bathroom, 15 feet away, then lie on the floor trembling with cold and exhaustion for a bit before I could summon the strength to get back to bed. The misery was unfathomable to anyone who has never had the real flu. My fever was so high for so long that my skin was hot, dry, and tight for days.* My girlfriend--normally a snuggler--chased me away because I was perpetually cold and I was cooking her. She finally convinced me to take aspirin to break the fever. When it broke, I sweated buckets. I've never seen anything like it. I probably ruined the mattress (oh wait...I think it was, appropriately, a water bed). Every two hours, I needed a new tshirt because the one I was wearing--as well as the towels I was padding the bed with--were so soaked that they could be wrung out. That went on for over 24 hours before it slowed down. After that, I was too weak to start back on my running routine for another month. 

* At the same time, I don't think my skin has ever been so perfectly transluscent. 

I never forgot that experience. I never skipped another flu shot/mist that I can remember. I now get them every year by mandate, and I'm fine with that. Mich gets them too. 

So last week, around Monday, I started coughing a bit. Lovely. We'd just driven to Vegas for a lovely 67-degree Christmas week with great shows and fun. My coughing intensified through the week. By the time we were driving home the following Saturday, I was drinking Robutussin DM and sucking on cough drops addictively. I figured I just has a nasty Vegas cold or something. 

Monday, I went to work briefly, to check in, check my email box, and pick up lesson prep materials, then came home, where the fever struck with a vengeance. It was better than 102 through the night, but by morning, it had dropped again to something like 99. Almost normal, right? Nothing to worry about then! 

Tuesday was a family day, so I laid around the house all day, swaddled in PJs and blankets and cats. I had a couple of other annoying problems, though. I had an ongoing earache, spiking pains in my bladder, and a sharp stabbing pain in the back of my skull. The fever stayed relatively low until around 8pm, though, when my temperature shot back up to over 102. We went to bed at 8:30. It was a miserable night. Mich let me snuggle, though (I think it helps that her normal body temp is 97.6, which somehow made it bearable for her). She said my temp had to be over 104 a couple of times through there, because I was cooking. When I woke the next morning, my temp had dropped back to 99.2 or so. 

I'd realized by now that this didn't mean I was going to be ok. The thing was just regrouping. We called a couple of Urgent Care clinics, but they weren't open, so we hit the ER around 9:30. The doctor checked everything I complained about. I had no ear problem and no bladder infection. He ran a culture at my request (instead of just assuming I had the flu and releasing me), and it came back positive for Influenza A. He prescribed Tamiflu and put me on bedrest for the next few days. 

It was a bit weird that he listened to my lungs and said they sound clear. Dude...my lungs whistle when I breathe. I cough until I have no air left in my lungs, and when the cough hits, it feels like my head is about to split right down the middle and possibly give birth to an alien. 

I started the Tamiflu immediately and took a hydrocodone to try to make the pain in my head stop, at least, and thus made it through the day relatively unscathed. I slept better last night. My fever seems to be breaking; I wake up and have to change my tshirt. But that's good. I'll exchange random stabs in the skull for a sweating problem any day. 

This morning, I feel much better, although I'm probably going to don and remove my sweatshirt about 50 times in the course of the day and it still hurts to move my eyes very much. My appetite is coming back, though, and no one is stabbing me in the back of my head with an ice pick today, so all is right with the world, as far as I'm concerned. 

Happy flu year, y'all. 

d