If you came to see me late in the afternoon on Friday during Reading Day, you may have noticed I wasn't my usual chipper self. Perhaps, you thought I seemed a bit out of it. You were right. Let's go back a day to start from the beginning.
THURSDAY
Thursday started with a cough. The cough, I could handle. I was happy that even though I had a cough, my throat wasn't super sore. Awesome!
Thursday evening was spent hacking out my lungs. I decided to climb into bed early, around 8:30 pm as I felt slightly under the weather. I thought to myself, "no big deal, I'll go to sleep early and feel better in the morning." It's amazing how frequently I am wrong.
I woke up multiple times Thursday night, sitting straight up in bed, attempting to catch my breath after bouts of dry, wheezy coughs. I hate those coughs. They are the ones where you struggle breathe and need to take a deep breath before coughing.
FRIDAY
Late Thursday night's coughs proceeded seamlessly into early Friday morning coughs. Waking up for work on Friday, I felt as though I barely slept. This makes sense since the most restorative sleep is deep sleep. Achieving deep sleep occurs after your body cycles through four stages of sleep. The fourth stage is the most restorative stage, but can only be achieved after your body completes the first three stages. Unfortunately, every time you wake up, your body starts the sleep cycle over again at Stage 1.
In the beginning of Reading Day, I answered student questions left and right, only interrupted by my cough. But around 10:30 am, more symptoms arose. My neck stiffened, my back throbbed, and why was the room spinning? This illness started to win its battle against my body and my symptoms slowly overpowered me. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have taken some medicine and felt much better, but no, I continued on with the day.
By 11:30 am, when someone would ask a question, I would just look at them with wide eyes, not saying a word. I didn't do this to be funny. I actually though I was answering them. It would take me a minute or two to realize that the entire time I thought I had been flawlessly answering their question, I had really been awkwardly staring at them in total silence. When I did finally speak, my words stumbled over one another. My brain tried to process their question, but instead, my sole thoughts repeated in my mind, "You don't feel so good. You need to lie down. Are you sick? Why am you referring to yourself in the second person? Who does that? Maybe you should go home."
Around 12:30 pm, when asked a question, rather than awkwardly stare, I managed to smile and nod my head, affirmatively. Unfortunately, most of the questions posed required more than a simple nod of the head as very few of the questions were 'yes' or 'no' questions.
When a student asked, "Why is ln (13) + (0.04t)ln (e)? Why wouldn't it be (0.04t)ln(13e)?" I looked at them with wide eyes, smiled, and slowly nodded my head up and down. As you can imagine, this led to even more confusion. Also, the ln (13) + (0.04t)ln (e) is correct. Remember, logarithms are just the inverse of exponents and therefore maintain the same properties. Also, if you're still confused, email me, I have a great proof for it.
Rather than illustrate the properties of natural logarithms - that when you have two values being multiplied and you then their log, you result in the two multiplied values becoming logs of the same base that are added together or show them an exquisite and straightforward proof - I could only muster, "Look at your notes!"
Talk about frustrating.
My poor students, overtaxed with preparing for exams, came to me for clarification. Yet, in my state, I managed to stare at them awkwardly and cough in their faces. No, not actually cough in their faces, that's rude and disgusting. When you cough, you pull a Dracula.
That is the Dracula. It prevents germs from flying across the room when you sneeze or cough. It's the polite thing to do. It's also adorable when small children do the Dracula.
Side Note: As a teacher, it is very important that my students and really everyone for that matter to always give credit where credit is due. Whenever I put a picture on my blog that I didn't draw, I link the picture back to its original website. This also helps avoid any copyright infringement. So if you click on this picture of Sir Sneeze-A-Lot, it will take you to Comic Company, a UK based website that makes comics.
The Dracula or Zombie Sneeze is crucial when working in germ hot spots like hospitals, senior care centers, grocery stores, retail stores, and, you guessed it, schools.
I have a lame immune system. My sister, Melissa who is at college, studying to become a nurse, believes my lame immune system is due a few things:
- Teaching in a new school = new germs that my body needs to learn to defend against
- Not getting enough vitamins - I now take gummy vitamins because when it comes down to it, I am a 5 year old and I love gummy candies.
- Being born a month premature - I didn't get the opportunity to fully develop in the womb. I have a great story about being born premature, but I will save that for another time.
I convinced myself that my symptoms were physical manifestations of stress due to Reading Day, the day before the beginning of exams where students come and ask teachers questions. I reasoned the questions were just too much for me to handle. I convinced myself, an extended break from the questions would bring me back to normal. Wrong again. The questions were fine. In retrospect, I enjoyed Reading Day. I liked the change of pace and people popping by to see me. What I didn't like was my body's internal battle.
By late Friday afternoon, chills engulfed my body, I schlepped home. When I made it home, I pulled out a thermometer and took my temperature. It read 100.3 F. A fever. As a kid, having a fever around 100 F wasn't the worst thing. It wasn't serious until your fever was above 101 F. As an adult, it's different. As an adult, you have a fever if your temperature is 99 F or higher. Side Note: I'm linking scholarly articles to back up any claims I make, so that you know what I've said is legit.
From there, things got worse.
I collasped into bed. My aches intensified, my fever climbed higher and higher, my cough dry and wheezy, my chills turned into a cold sweat.
Joey brought home sushi and noodles. My appetite shrunken, I ate a few pieces of tuna, it's not a good idea to eat raw fish when you're sick, but I still hadn't accepted I was in fact sick, and a small bowl of noodles.
NyQuil helped bring my temperature down to 99.5 F, a low grade fever. I couldn't sleep. Instead, I took a bath, the warmth of the water coaxed my alertness into submissions as I nearly fell asleep in the tub. Dangerous. I mustered all of my energy to climb out of the tub and back into bed.
That night, between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am, I woke up every 30 - 45 minutes drenched in a cold sweat. I tossed and turned, coughed, and shook. At times, when I couldn't sleep, I flailed my arm towards my nightstand, in an attempt reach for my phone, but moving hurt so much that I quickly gave up, and instead laid there silently in pain.
With all of these symptoms, I could no longer deny it; I was sick.
They say you know you have the flu when you think of death in two ways. At first, you think to yourself, "I feel like death." But then the second wave hits, it gets so bad that you think to yourself, "I'd rather be dead."
I remember the last time I had the flu, 5 years ago, my fever reached 102.3 F and stayed around 101 F for hours on end. Due to the ongoing fever and pain accompanied with the flu, I welcomed the concept of death. I remember thinking, "whatever happens after death has got to be better than what I feel right now." Fevers can really mess with your thought process.
For me, one of the worst parts is the delirium that accompanies lengthy fevers. I become confused, emotional, and scared of silly things. When I had the fever of 102.3 F, I remember crying to Joey because I was scared to go to sleep. He asked why and I couldn't give him an answer. The concept of being unconscious simply frightened me. Of course, the one thing my body REALLY needed was sleep and I was scared to sleep. Stupid body sending mixed messages.
For the majority of the time, I aim to think and act logically. When I'm sick, my dreams are as illogical as they come. On Friday night, I dreamt of many things including a bizarre episode in which Joey and I attended the Spanish College Superbowl Halftime Show, this is not a real thing.
Note that we didn't actually attend the Spanish College Superbowl in my dream, nope, we only went for the halftime show.
We stood in darkness, waiting for the band to arrive on stage. Then the lights shined towards two people casually walking to the stage. This was the band. They didn't sing at first. They instead talked about politics. Joey and I looked at one another in confusion. What type of halftime show was this? People around us did the slow awkward no-one-knows-what-is-going-on clap, while others booed.
Finally, the unknown two-man band realized "Oops, we aren't here to discuss politics, we're here to sing. Our bad." Unfortunately, they chose a song no one knew.
As they sang, a jumbo-tron behind them lit up to show a video of two more people. It was OPRAH and someone else who doesn't matter because OPRAH.
Oprah started singing. I didn't even know Oprah could sing. I so badly wanted Oprah to come out from behind the screen and sing live. She didn't. I remember feeling sad in the dream. After realizing Oprah wasn't going to show up, I decided that my life would be okay even if I missed this "epic" half time show. Instead, I searched for a bathroom.
I noticed the halls were empty. This was probably due to the College Superbowl being lame. This is the point when I learned that not only was this the College Superbowl Half Time Show, but the Spanish College Super Bowl Half Time Show.
As I looked for the bathroom, a green sign caught my eye. It declared "Lavatoria" which doesn't mean anything in Spanish or any other language for that matter. However, "Lavatorio" means sink, so I guess my feverish brain forgot that I know THREE different CORRECT ways to say "bathroom" in Spanish, and instead, decided to do it's best by taking the Spanish word for sink, and making it feminine by changing the "o" to an "a". However, since "sink" is a noun, you can't change the last letter. C'mon brain, you know your Spanish vocabulary rules better than that.
After I left the "lavatoria" and traversed the empty halls, KT Tunstall's song, "Black Horse and a Cherry Tree" blasted through the hallways. It's a great song, but it made absolutely no sense in my dream.
Great song - No idea why it played as I navigated my way back to my seat.
SATURDAY
My brain played every verse of the song as I dreamt of dancing down the empty hallways back to where Joey sat. I woke up at the end of the KT Tunstall song, drenched in a cold sweat, my body was on fire, darts of pain shot through my body. I rolled over to see the clock which said 3:27 am. I really didn't like life at 3:27 am.
I didn't know what to do with myself. Laying in bed proved useless, moving required more energy than I possessed. Something needed to change, the pain was too great. Resorting to taking another bath at 3:30 am to help alleviate the aches of my body, I applied all of my energy towards dragging my body out of bed and into the bath.
After my bath, I made my way back to bed, pet Lila on the head, and fell asleep.
At 8:00 am on Saturday morning, Lila greeted me by licking my hand. Normally, she let us sleep in on the weekends. I took my temperature. It read 101.1 F. My fever managed to survive and thrive through the night. It was time for more medicine. I took DayQuil, pet Lila, and drifted off to sleep.
I later awoke to Joey standing over me, his face filled with worry.
"Are you cold?" he asked, very concerned.
"No" I groaned.
"Your whole body is shaking though."
He was right. I had been convulsing in my sleep. I named it "The Shakes." The shakes continued as Joey held my feet in an attempt to get me to stop shaking. It didn't work. He tried holding my legs, but still I shook. He sat at the edge of the bed, trying to think of any way he could help. I closed my eyes, falling back asleep. I woke up a few hours later and happily, the shakes were gone.
Even with the DayQuil, my fever held strong at 100.2 F. It had been nearly 24 hours with this fever. This was too long. This fever needed to break. In my experience, I get one really, really bad fever during the flu. It's like one epic battle. The rest are smaller, less painful battles. I have other fevers during the flu, but none with as high of a temperature or for as long as the one epic fever. I needed this fever to hurry up and break so that I could start on the road to recovery.
At that point, I felt like I was in the early 1900s, imagine Downton Abbey time, sick in bed, with people looking over me, one whispering to the doctor, "Doctor, will she be alrightt?" And the doctor replying, "I'm not sure, she has to make it through tonight."
If you watch Downton Abbey, amazing show, I felt as if I was one of the unfortunate ones who fell ill with the Spanish Flu in Season 2.
If you've never seen the show, don't worry, I won't spoil it. I will instead give you a history lesson. The Spanish Flu, also known as La Grippe was a pandemic that killed 50 million people between 1918 and 1919. It was caused by the H1N1 strain that back in 2008 was called Swine Flu. Interestingly enough, the Spanish Flu was given the name because at the time, WWI was occurring and reporters in Germany, the US, Britain, and France didn't want people to lose morale, so they censored the number of illnesses and deaths in their respective countries. However, since Spain remained neutral during the war, reporters were free to give a more accurate count of those infected and those dead in Spain from the flu. This made it look as though the flu was hitting hardest in Spain. If you want to read more, click on the link and read the Wikipedia article on it. It is amazing how much we can learn about so many different topics just by clicking a button and reading. People ask me how I know so much about so many things. When I don't know something, I goog (it's catching on) it, I read a bunch of articles about it, and absorb all of the information.
Also, look at how much you just learned. You're welcome.
Around noon, I woke to see Lila lying at my side. She wagged her tail and sprung off the bed, surprised by my awakening. She jumped back up and barked with glee. Her bark alerted Joey to my consciousness.
Joey came in to the bedroom and smiled. "Are you hungry?" he asked. I nodded. I hadn't eaten since anything substantial since early Friday evening. Joey brought me a small bowl of oatmeal. I ate it slowly; slowly as in eating a single spoonful proved a task demanding a minimum of unsuccessful five attempts before even the smallest amount made its way into my mouth. Normally, eating oatmeal provided no difficulty, but in my sickened state, I convinced myself that it would be easier to eat if I held my head sideways, with my ear on my shoulder. It didn't. If anything it made it harder as I tried to make the spoon reach my mouth, I frequently missed, the spoon hit my cheek, and globs of oatmeal hit the blanket, much to Lila's delight. Clearly, the fever messed with my logic and ability to do the most basic of tasks.
In such pain, I found myself unable to get up and use the bathroom. Instead, anytime I had to go to the bathroom, I convinced myself that I didn't really have to go and instead fell back asleep.
My fever finally broke at 4:30 pm. I emerged from the bedroom much to Joey's and Lila's pleasant surprise. This whole ordeal confused Lila like none other. She couldn't figure out why I was spending so much time in bed.
Saturday evening my mom stopped by with homemade Matzah Ball soup because she is the best mom ever! She also brought some groceries, like orange juice, oranges, bananas, cans of soup, really all the things you need when you're sick. Plus, she brought dinner for Joey and herself. Too wonderful! Joey and my mom spent the evening chatting while I slipped in and out of consciousness on the couch. I don't even know if they noticed when I was with it and wasn't with it. Sometimes I would join in on the conversation, but most of the time, I slipped into dreamland. Part of the time, I ate the soup.
The soup was amazing. My mom puts an entire onion in it, along with root vegetables, like squash, potatoes, parsnip, carrots, all the things that are good for you. I gratefully sipped it, the warm broth eased the pain in my chest and brought comfort to my achy body. The orange juice provided me with much needed vitamin C, even though on the list of top 10 Vitamin C rich food, oranges rank ninth. Kind of pathetic. Seriously though, the best remedy to any virus, cold, flu, etc. is a big bowl of matzah ball soup and a glass of orange juice. People say that matzah ball soup is Jewish penicillin. That's bad for me since I am severely allergic to penicillin, but so far, the matzah ball soup has proved helpful and has not once sent me into anaphylactic shock.
As my mom left, she instructed me to bed. My complexion, still ghostly pale, indicated battles remaining. My fever and symptoms returned in the middle of the night. However, their severity diminished in comparison to the fever of the previous night and earlier in the day.
SUNDAY
At 4:35 am, I awoke with the shakes. My whole body trembled non-stop. I closed my eyes, thinking it would somehow cause my body to stop shaking. It didn't. I wrapped my blankets tightly around my body to no avail. The shakes remained.
Unable to devise another option, I headed to the bath. My sisters and I are all the same, whenever we were sick, we headed right to the Jacuzzi. Because the Jacuzzi was so big, the water could fill up to your neck, allowing the warmth to penetrate through your chest, and break up the mucus, alleviate aches and pains, and begin to feel better. Due to this, I always take a bath if I feel sick.
The bath proved helpful the shakes ceased. At 4:55 am, I made my way back into bed. I fell asleep instantly, sleeping for hours.
At 11 am, I sat straight up, gasping for air as a coughing fit took over. Worried, Lila jumped on the bed and attempted to lick my face while I coughed. I pushed her to the side. She incorrectly interpreted this to mean we were playing a game. She bounced around the bed, wagging her tail, barking, in the hopes that I might chase her. Meanwhile, I struggled to fill my lungs with an adequate amount of air. Sometimes, she isn't the brightest.
I spent the majority of Sunday with a low grade fever. Around 3 pm, the fever dissipated leaving me fever free! This was very exciting.
It looked as though my round the clock taking of DayQuil/NyQuil, every Quil and any Quil helped. I even managed to walk Lila outside for 7 whole minutes. Of course, minute 7 proved one minute too much for my sick body and leading to non-stop coughing, followed by sleep.
Night time is always the worst, so why would Sunday night be any different? It's as if the germs retreat during the day, regroup, and plan their attack for the nighttime.
Sunday night was awful. The coughing, the return of the fever, and the aches and pains. I was looking forward to Monday morning, just to get a break from it.
MONDAY
That brings us to today. I woke up, took my gummy vitamins, took DayQuil, drank a glass of orange juice, and put the matzah ball soup on the stove. I am taking it easy today, mainly resting and revising my exam. Today is going to be a good day, regardless of what the flu has in store for me.
You hear that flu? I'm coming for you. I'm ready to take you on. You think you've won this war; well, you're wrong. I will not be another one of your victims. Did you know, according to the CDC between 3,000 and 49,000 people DIE from the flu each year? That is absolutely awful.
Now I am fully aware that I am not going to die from this. I'm not even going to be hospitalized or need to see the doctor. When I say I won't be a victim of the flu, I mean, it's over between us, flu. You are to evacuate from the temple that is my body. I've served you the eviction notice, but I'm not giving you 30 days to vacate the premises, you've got to go NOW.
And next year, I will be getting the flu shot before you get the chance infect me.
The worst part about this sickness was that Joey and I planned to go skiing and snowboarding on Sunday. We definitely didn't get to do that. Plus our friends invited us to Blue Moon Cafe, home of the famous Captain Crunch French Toast Waffles and delicious pancakes, I didn't get to go to that either. Now I really want pancakes.
However, it is important to see the good in everything. Although the flu has been awful, it could have been much worse. The symptoms could have hit hard during the beginning of the week, forcing me to miss school. Or Joey, who has the immune system of Superman, he rarely if ever gets sick, maybe the sniffles - occasionally, he is the Occasional Sniffles Man, could have fallen ill as well. Somehow he is still 100% flu free. I can only hope that when we have children, they inherit his immune system. Seriously. I am lucky with 20/20 vision and straight teeth which never required braces, but when it comes to a desirable immune system, I am truly lacking.
Finally, the best thing about being sick is how much you appreciate being healthy afterwards. Even though I describe my immune system as lame, it still performs an amazing job of keeping me healthy for the majority of the time. For that and for the health of those I love most, those around me, and the health of all people, I am appreciative and thankful.
We easily focus on the negative aspects of life, complaining, wishing for a change, when instead we should focus on the numerous good aspects and should work to spread that good everywhere we go.
AND FINALLY -
To my girls, good luck on exams. You will rock this. I will be posting AGAIN tomorrow, Tuesday, January 21, to remind you that I believe in you. If you studied and prepared properly, I know you will ROCK your exams.
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