See, the thing is, I never used to get sick. My wife, Molly, will disagree with me on that, but we’ve only been together for five years, so she’s not really qualified to comment on my pre-Molly health conditions. Sure, my sinuses have always been bad, and I do have springtime allergies to various floating pollens and such, but serious illness? Very, very rare ‘round these parts, cowboy.
That’s why this virus is so absolutely amazing to me, because I can’t recall ever being so laid out by a sick before. I slept on and off most of the day, and it would have been definitely more in the “most” category if Sophie hadn’t have been home. She was all about taking care of Daddy as much as she could, but the girl has to eat, and she can only reach things in the fridge that are about four feet off the ground, so that meant she would wake me up every hour or so with a “I hungry, Daddy,” which forced me to crawl off the couch and go grab her some yogurt or pickles or a glass of milk. Also, while she’s big on going to the potty herself, she’s not quite mastered the fine art of wiping her own ass yet, so there were a couple of times when she would wake me that I would open my eyes and be presented with a poopy butt needing my immediate attentions. Just the thing when you’re wishing death would just take you and end your suffering.
And that’s the really crazy part about this bug I’ve got, at least to me. It has so absolutely and completely waylaid me that I had a moment where I actually was thinking that death would be a good alternative. Mid-afternoon, I desperately needed to have a pee, so I got up and started fumbling my way to the downstairs bathroom, but my head was spinning so outrageously that I couldn’t make the walk. Instead, I crawled to the toilet, climbed on it, sat and did my pee business, but then I found that I couldn’t actually get up off the toilet again. I literally hadn’t the strength to get myself off of it. So I sat for a few moments until my head felt like it was going to pop off, then I slid to the floor. The linoleum was freezing but I couldn’t even get up the energy to pull my pants up, so instead I crawled to the hallway outside and just lay on the carpet, with my pants around my ankles, while the dog tried to lick my head and Sophie kept asking, “You fall down, Daddy?”
That was just such a weird and alien moment for me. I literally thought that I would have to call Molly and have her take me to the emergency room, because I absolutely and in every way could not function. I had this terrible thought that I could just die right there on the carpet, and Sophie would have to hang out with dead Daddy for a good three or four hours until Molly got home. Would the dog try to eat me before then? He must know that I don’t like him. This could be his moment of vengeance for all the times I’ve called him a dumb dog and kicked him out into the backyard when I was tired of him being a douche. Who would cancel my Facebook account, so that my friends wouldn’t be receiving “get back in touch” notifications from my ghost (which is a real concern: a friend of mine died last year, and I still get very regular prompts from Facebook to reconnect with her, which is just creepy)? Who would delete my vast library of Mexican midget donkey porn before Molly stumbled across it in a folder labeled “Car Expenses and Licorice Tallies, ‘05-’10?”
I’m not sure if it was the porn or the thought of being eaten by the dog that forced me to get my ass up and moving, but whatever prompted me to, I finally managed to get myself up. I had decided that my problem, other than being ill of course, was that I had been burning a wicked fever for hours, sweating like a pig, and I hadn’t been drinking any fluids at all. Obviously I must have been terribly dehydrated, which makes perfect sense in retrospect, but when you’re caught up in a fever haze, you’re obviously not thinking terribly straight. At least, I wasn’t. So I forced myself to drink down a couple of glasses of water, and I brought two bananas and a yogurt back to the couch with me, since I also hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, preferring sleep over food. This seemed to improve my condition greatly, although I was still feverish and feeling like absolute and complete shit. At least I was a hydrated piece of shit now, and not a dried and fossilized one.
So now it’s the third day of this fun, and I had to go in to work because there wasn’t anyone to cover me, which is always a wonderful position to be put into—do you call in anyway and force everyone else to pick up twice as much slack as usual, or do you go in and do your job but maybe infect everyone around you with your horrible, nasty ickiness? I voted for not going in, but my boss voted otherwise, and so here I am, trying not to cough on anyone and wiping down every surface I touch with bleach wipes. I don’t want to be Patient Zero in a companywide medical outbreak.
Things would be so much easier if I were just filthy, fucking rich.
