August 19, 2010
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Monday and Tuesday were a huge waste of time, also known as TA training. I've already been a TA several times in the past and as someone who speaks English fluently there was no point for me to be there. Worse yet is that I happened to contract some kind of fever from one of the hundreds of people I walked past, bumped into, grabbed a donut after, etc. Tuesday night my joints started aching and I chalked it up to feeling lazy and did P90X anyway. Afterward I almost passed out and I realized something was wrong. Check the temperature and sure enough I was sitting at 100.6 F. I felt horrendous. Every part of my body ached and my mouth was constantly dry. The only way I was able to sleep was to take some acetaminophen and wait for the pain to subside. I woke up Wednesday and took my temperature again. I didn't feel any better, but I was down to 99.8 F. I spent a majority of the day rocking back and forth on the bed with a Top Chef marathon running in the background to help distract me from all the pain throughout my body. It was so bad that I couldn't even focus enough to play Pokemon. I mean, holy shit, that game is easy and I couldn't play it! My husband was such a wonderful nurse the whole time, getting me water, medicine, ice cream, whatever I needed and comforting me. By the end of the day I felt quite a bit better, but still had to take an acetaminophen to be able to fall asleep. And today I felt well enough to at least venture into the office to get a bit of work done. I think I should be completely back to normal by tomorrow.
Anyway, the main reason I'm making this post is that I haven't been that ill for a really long time, probably since high school, and it was weird to not have my parents around to take care of me. I mean, I'm sure there were many times throughout my undergraduate career where I faked sick because I was lazy, but I was never actually sick. This is the first time in probably 6 or 7 years that I've had an fever. After 18 years of grape slushies, that one fuzzy tiger blanket and The Price is Right on the television, it was really strange and quite thought provoking to be sick again. All I could think about the whole time was how my dad would tuck me in on the couch and my mom would cook me things and check on me throughout the day back when I was younger. And then I started thinking about what it was like when my mom was in the hospital. And then I started thinking about death and what I would have wanted to say to people before I died. And all this over a simple fever. Perhaps in some ways it is better to get sick slightly more often so that when you do it isn't such a mentally taxing thing. I even contemplated if I had somehow contracted AIDS and that's why I had gotten sick, since my immune system seemed so strong as of late. The mind does strange and horrible things when the body is weak and in pain, and I definitely didn't enjoy it.
Well, I need to get back to my experiments.
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