Bone In The Throat

Yeah, I wussed out. I went to the doctor yesterday. I’m still running occasional low grade fevers. In fact I went into the office and my temp was normal, 15 minutes later when the Doc saw me, I was running a low grade fever, and my temp was climbing.

The Doc bled me, so he could run all the tests for sexually transmitted diseases and a variety of other things. He wrote me a note to keep my employers off my ass for a couple of weeks and told me to go home, rest, and not to go to work if I was running a fever.

I just got  off the phone with him, and the tests came back all negative. So on the one hand that’s good news, I don’t have anything really nasty, I don’t have any STDs and hey since I’m clean… I’m open for business! Anybody wanna come over and make a guy feel better?

Still no explanation about what I actually had, but the Doc seems to think I’m on the winning side of this and should start feeling normal in a few more days. 

I didn’t go to work today and I’m sure there’ll be hell to pay for that but I’ll burn that bridge when I fucking get to it. I’ll go to work tomorrow and Sunday then I’ll go back to trying to be a good little boy (A.K.A. a Slave).

But for the next two weeks, if I have a fever I’m not going to that shithole.

I was very tired yesterday when I got home, but this morning in addition to the fever I was also awakened by a man’s best friend. No, not a dog… Every man’s BFF! I take that as a sign that I’m getting better.

Hopefully when this passes, I’ll be back to my normal crotchety self and not have any lingering effects.

So my weekend plans were completely trashed!

I came home Tuesday after work and was looking forward to my two days off.

I was feeling unusually tired, but didn’t think much of that since we still have mandatory overtime in place.

I get the concept of mandatory overtime but don’t get the concept behind punishing you if you’re unable to meet the ever changing mandatory overtime requirement.

Anyhow, I laid down on the couch and then I was chilled. It was 78º at the time. I pulled a light blanket over myself and napped. Later that night I woke up shivering. The kind of shivering that I’ve only experienced when I’m really sick. I’m talking a fever of 104º or higher.

(Yes I know adults aren’t supposed to run fevers that high. Well you can talk with God about my many design flaws.)

I was shaking so bad and muscles cramping that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get off the couch to get to my bed. After a long time I managed to coax my body to be compliant enough to get to the pantry and grab a bottle of water then made it to my bed.

Thus began what my sleep application shows as a 34 hour broken sleep cycle. I wasn’t asleep the whole time, but I wondered at several points if I was going to simply die. I don’t honestly know what the upper limit of high fever is before you experience brain damage and organ failure but I did wonder if I was going to find out the hard way.

When I woke up sometime on Wednesday I cancelled my planned weekend on the mountain. And then I went back to bed. That was how I spent Wednesday and much of Thursday. Late Thursday I got up feeling a little better. I now had a mission, I needed to get to the grocery store, do laundry, and drop by the pharmacy to (Now here’s an Idea…) buy a thermometer. Guestimating from the kitchen meat thermometer pressed in my armpit wasn’t giving me the kind of accuracy this situation required. 

(Hey ya work with what ya got!) Besides it’s washable! I took using the meat thermometer as a sign that either my brain wasn’t damaged and I was thinking about and trying to work the problem, OR my brain was damaged and I was behaving like those folks who take off all their clothes in the snow when they’re suffering from hypothermia.

By the way, I HATE CVS! $14.00 for one thermometer, $56.00 for another? With nothing in between? Are you fucking kidding me? give me the good old days of a standard mercury thermometer. OH RIGHT, we can’t have one of those anymore because mercury is dangerous…

I grew up with mercury thermometers and I think the entire time I was growing up,  there were maybe 2 that got broken. I can remember my Dad putting piece of paper on the floor and using a small bit of tissue to coax the shiny metal onto the paper then folding it up and tossing it in pill bottle. Nobody DIED, and I’m betting if there were such things as recycling or hazardous waste disposal facilities that the 1/2 gram of mercury would have been disposed of properly. It wasn’t, because there weren’t. Turns out that Dad did reuse the mercury to make mercury switches. He serviced electronics, and when he couldn’t get parts for an old piece of equipment he was working on, he’d fabricate the replacement part himself. Back then, repairing something was recycling. I’d bet I could still fabricate a functional mercury switch. Two steel contacts, a glass tube and a blowtorch. DONE! No waiting for 4 weeks for parts to be shipped in from Japan.  

Of course saying that on a blog will probably get me on a watch list somewhere. So be it. You can scrub the internet of useful information (A.K.A. Potentially dangerous information), You can edit the libraries, but you can’t take my knowledge from me.

I digress, It’s just that I’m old enough to remember being taught how stuff worked and that being able to repair something was honorable. This disposable society sometimes bugs the crap out of me. More often than not, the simplest, cheapest solution is one that is also durable and involved repair, not replacement.

Anyhow, armed with my snazzy new thermometer, breakfast in my belly, and some staples from the grocery store, I returned to my apartment which smelled like wild kingdom by this time and went back to bed, where I remained for the next 24 hours.

I didn’t go to work on Friday, I was still running a fever of anywhere between 102.5 to 102.9 and spent much of Friday in bed jackhammering with chills and sweats. Saturday I went to work for 1/2 day (Doubtful that the company will appreciate that) Sunday I was at work for 4.5 hours before the shivering became intense enough to drive me back to my bed.

Monday I flat called out. Sometime around 5PM I had my first normal temp for almost a week.

It was then that I started wondering about the last time I actually ate. Then it hit me. For the previous 7 days, I’d had 2 meals. I wasn’t snacking or anything else I flat out hadn’t eaten. Nothing sounded good, in fact food was the last thing on my mind. That was when I decided it was time to eat something. No wonder my body was pissed off. Not that I don’t have a bit of a fat reserve to burn, but not eating is not good.

Tuesday, I was tired but functional, but I looked rough. Even my normally self absorbed supervisor said I looked like I’d lost weight.

I’m glad whatever this was didn’t kill me, but I’m pissed that I was so out of it I lost an entire week that would have been better spent looking for a new job.

Anyway, now you know why I was perhaps ignoring phone calls, text messages, and the like. It wasn’t personal, I just didn’t have the energy.