Down With the Sickness

Ugh...another week I've gone without updating this thing. Good thing no one ever reads it.

I caught a flu bug this week--without question the worst one that I can remember. I was fine after my trip to Baltimore, and even had a friend stop by to watch 24 with me on Monday night. I went to bed feeling fine, albeit a little chilly (which is nothing new, since my house dates back to the early part of the 20th century and most of its doors and windows have gaps big enough to put a baby's pinky through). But when I woke up no less than six times during the night in a cold sweat, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, when I woke up a little before 7 AM, I could barely get out of bed--I was freezing, sweating, and aching all at once. A quick check of my temperature confirmed I had a fever (right around 101), so I called in sick to work and settled down on my couch to get some rest and catch up on my Tivo-watching. Or so I thought.

I was so exhausted that I was asleep for about three hours for every one I was awake. Unfortunately, when I did wake up, it was because my particular flu bug came with a prize: a stomach component that had me...trotting...up the stairs to the bathroom every couple hours. Or at least it would have if I'd been able to trot. I had to more or less drag myself up the stairs--and more than once, I thought I was going to tumble down them, crash through the window at the bottom of them, and not be found until my carcass started to smell.

Fortunately, the flu portion of the bug subsided by Wednesday morning, and I was able to make it the rest of the way through the week. And even more fortunately, my stomach symptoms went away by the weekend, so I was able to enjoy a visit to my parents' house with them and my grandparents. We ate some good food (I get all my cooking skill from my mother) and watched a lot of good NCAA tournament games. I'm not a particularly big basketball fan (I never watch the NBA, and don't watch college hoops until about late February), but watching Bucknell (my father's alma mater, which made the game even more fun to watch) win a huge upset over Kansas and watching West Virginia knock off Wake Forest in double overtime were two of the greatest hoops contests I've seen in a long, long time.