Peter Rogers's Blog
Artist-in-Residence at Chez Firth

Wednesday (1/5/11) 10:10pm - ... wherein Peter is occasionally feverish.  What's up with that?

I thought I'd post about the weird little sickness I've had this week.

The first sign of it happened late Sunday night.  In the middle of the night I slipped out of bed -- maybe to get food or to use the restroom -- and I suddenly found myself shivering.  The thermometer in my apartment^[1] said it was 72°.  Odd.

Then I was fine all day Monday.  I trotted around town catching up on errands.  Then that night, around ten pm, some serious chills set in, this time with the queasy, achey feelings I associate with a fever.  I shivered, went to bed, and piled on blankets.  A bit later, my temperature was 100.3° -- not a high fever, but my body was trying to cook *some* kind of pathogen to death.

I woke up Tuesday morning feeling relatively normal, but also covered in blankets and drenched in sweat.

The last two days have been odd.  The symptoms -- malaise, a slight unproductive cough, body aches, and headaches -- have come and gone.  And it's a very, very *clear* coming-and-going -- either I'm just fine (as I am just now), or it's oh-god-I-have-to-lie-down.  On Tuesday afternoon I checked in with the office health clinic.  They figured out that it wasn't flu (whew), and told me to get back to them if it got worse.

Last night I didn't have any obvious chills, but then I wound up with insomnia in the wee hours, and today I was loopy and aching through most of the workday.  (This made my regularly-scheduled employee evaluation interesting.)  After a couple of hours' lie-down at home, I was alert enough to set up my Roku box, which was time-consuming but not particularly thinky.

At the moment I seem to be more-or-less normal.

So now I suppose I just wait for this beastie, whatever it is, to go away.  I guess I'm not going to the Fed tomorrow, unless tonight's recovery is permanent.  I suspect I won't make it to KBB, if the strange illness^[2] sticks around.

It's weird, though.  This doesn't have any conventional cold symptoms.  There's no congestion, or sneezing, or sore throat.  Even the cough is minimal.  And when I feel okay, I feel pretty much 100% okay.  At those times, I find myself wondering if this is all in my head -- that is, until the next round of shivering and instant-exhaustion sends me back to bed.

In any case, it's not a good start to 2011.

________
[1] Yes, I have a thermometer in my apartment.^[1b]

[1b] Two thermometers^[1b1], actually -- both of my digital wall clocks have indoor/outdoor thermometers.

[1b1] Three, if we count the thermometer on the thermostat, but that one's hard to read accurately.

[2] I'm calling it an "ague" on twitter, just because I think we need to give that word more use.

Mood: sick · Music: none

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