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.
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[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: ![]() |