Down for the count

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So after I type my last entry about lack of feedback, etc., I received an overwhelmingly positive response from you, my dear readers. As would be my luck, the day after posting it, feeling genuinely appreciative and inspired to be more consistent with writing, I got sick. And I mean sick.

I woke up with, uh, let’s be kind and say GI distress. No biggie, yet I hadn’t eaten anything out-of-the-ordinary, food from a different place, etc. Moreover, Claudia had no sx whatsoever, so I wasn’t concerned. By early afternoon, I knew something was amiss because I had been awake probably <1.5h since I woke up. Going back to sleep was such an involuntary response, I don’t even remember going back to bed from my room.

That’s when I noticed I was freezing. Anybody who knows me knows that I have a low tolerance for warm, stuffy environments and usually “run warm,” so for me to be cold when it’s clearly not cold outside was yet another WTF moment. By this time, Claudia knew something was up for sure, seeing me under two layers of covers in the afternoon perpetually asleep and shivering. I took my temperature around that time and it registered 102.5. Holy shit. It’s been years since I’ve had a fever. Even when I’ve had major surgery, my temp didn’t go higher than 101, and that was just during the few days post-op. And I was FREEZING.

Fast forward to late afternoon, and I guess in a daze I put on some warm-ups (which in retrospect wasn’t all that smart) and I’d probably downed >2g of Tylenol by then. Re-take temp: 103.5. Now I have one of those fancy-schmancy arterial IR thermometers we bought for baby, and right about then I was thinking it was a POS–there was no way it was that high. I went to my closet, realized that the room should not be spinning, and fetched my trusty mercury thermometer from my “doctor bag” (which is really a $15 shaving/toiletry bag with handles that looks the part, and which has been gathering dust since the Spring when I last used it in community medicine), and did a real, honest-to-God oral temp. I got the thermometer locally, so it’s Celsius, but it read 39.5–just under what the fancy-ass one read and close enough to know this was for real.

I called a doctor friend, and he just flatly said, “You have an infection.” No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for wasting my first cell minute. “Go and get [GI-localized antibiotic combo only here in Mexico which has neomycin].” I made a joke about my kidneys, but he said it wasn’t an issue for the dose and the few days’ duration of tx. I asked why he suspected a bacterial infection and not a virus. He didn’t have an “evidence-based” rationale, but then again, we were talking on the phone and it’s not like he had any data. Basically, if it was bacterial, at least the medicine he recommended would get something going; if it was viral, I was SOL, but since the abx isn’t really absorbed, no harm no foul. I could live with that. Claudia, a super-trooper with my man-cold, whiny ass, fetched said med from the pharmacy down the street.

I had already switched to ibuprofen for fever reduction, but something changed by night-time as I was feeling hot as hell. It was about damn time something makes sense! Checked temp again: 104.2. Again, I thought, “No way,” and swiped it the other direction (as if the left temporal artery was going to read differently from the right one). 104.3. F*CK! Now I’m in full panic. I didn’t want to go to the local ER because 1) I’m not insured, and 2) I didn’t want to burden Claudia with me AND deal with a toddler who should be asleep while at the hospital. Besides, although I felt like death warmed over, it’s not like I was delirious or anything. I was able to keep down all fluids, was eating fruit, crackers, and other “easy” foods, so there was plenty of reasons not to jump the gun.

Thankfully, before I could start entertaining REALLY crazy things, the fever started coming down. I had already started cooling myself off externally, and I think between that and the ibuprofen, it started making a dent in my core temperature. By midnight, my temp was down to a respectable 101, and–strangely enough–I was sweating bullets like at no time prior. I’ll trade sweating for ER-bound fever anyday, and so the night began to finally wind down.

The next day (which seemed like days later, esp. since my time was so off w/all the sleeping), I felt absolutely craptacular. In spite of a lower fever (which never again went over 100), I seemed to be just as lethargic but now had myalgia as icing on the cake. “I have a geezervirus,” I joked to myself.

So this whole, near-pointless tale of woe is being shared to say that it took until this weekend for me to feel normal. I was WAY behind on work hours, so I’ve been busy catching up with those too. I felt horrible guilty about the timing of my last post and this little mini-absence, but I promise the above is true. There’s quite a bit queued up in drafts from bits of time I felt decent, so I’ll clean those up and get them posted. Thanks again for all those who commented and especially those that delurked.

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  By Celeste, October 22, 2007 @ 10:28 am

  Man-cold. I LOVE THIS!!!!!!!

  One time we both got hit almost simultaneously with some really ugly flu. I told my friends about it later and asked them to guess which one of us was calling for a priest and which one was laundering the bedding and fetching soup.

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