Last Sunday, I had my talented and delightful friends Leila Gaskin and Kristi Tuck Austin over for a mini writing retreat. It was wonderfully evocative rainy day, and stories were read, research and writing were done. I felt low grade dizzy all day, and had a headache, but the company and the work were much to be grateful for.
By Tuesday, it was clear to me I had a migraine. The dizziness actually overwhelmed the pain, and I stayed plastered in bed until about one o'clock. Penelope and Gossamer, being the astonishingly forgiving wee and timorous beasties that they are, never even nudged me for breakfast or walkies. They curled up around me, and let me sleep and sleep and sleep.
On Wednesday because The Voice of G-d (or was that "mom"?) Hath Said It Must Not Be that you ever, ever, ever take two days off of work in a row for illness, I went in to work. And realized that this time the pain was overwhelming the dizziness, and I was miserable. My head has a grave disliking of tornado warnings, and we had more pink and red on the weather forecasts than I have ever seen in my life, and I spent years in the Midwest, y'all.
Thursday, and blessedly, I enjoyed The Final Symptom of some migraines - that physical and emotional euphoria that follows the release from bone-crunching pain - and I was very, very happy indeed.
I had planned for a while to take Friday off, do some cleaning and some other things around the house, and then go out for the evening to a Bowie event I thought would be fun.
My mom, forgetting I had taken the day off, called me right around five - and told me that there's been a certain health crisis in our family.
Who needs Bowie, I needed my family, so I hit the Italian place for penne pasta with marinara, a large Greek salad with light feta, and went over to spend the evening with her.
At 3:30 this morning, all I could hope was that the projectile issues sapping my body of all nutritional intake since the Reagan era were "just" food poisoning. Because heaven help my mom and stepfather, if I've got the flu ... and probably brought it over with my wonderful company last night.
Sadly (... um), this morning it transpires that mom had no problems last night, so our supper was not a source of food poisoning.
Also sadly, and yet kinda hilariously too, I am so dehydrated at this point, I went to lick my lips when I came downstairs, and my tongue stuck.
Sigh.
This seems very much not to be my week.
And now to contemplate, do I go to the doc-in-a-box and get a flu test and possibly Tamiflu, or do I hope like Hell this is "only" the 24-hour death, and curl back up with the furbabies and whinge at a friend to drop some ginger ale off on my back stooop?
What would you do? I'm addled and honestly unsure.
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2 comments:
Research in the UK, though far from conclusive, suggests that in a fit person who is not old or pregnant, there really is very little point in taking Tamiflu. Admittedly, the health model over here encourages a non-interventionist approach, but this often turns out to be a good approach.
Note that I am not a doctor and could be talking twaddle. But I wouldn't take it (and I doubt very much that the NHS would be sympathetic if I wanted to).
Now that is interesting to me. Not least because I have a distaste for my health care system's tendency to throw a pill at everything (and then discover, oopsy, that pill has HIDEOUS LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES, eep). One of my friends suffers debilitating anxiety and depression, and there is zero active treatment at all - just pills and talk therapy, no actual strategy for improvement. It sickens me.
I have a family member who is ill enough to have reached the point of literally, explicitly begging for death, and if we allowed this person to die at home in bed it would be ... well, unheard-of, to put it mildly.
As it happens, I didn't go in to the doctor, and that family member is in hospital; our chosen response to this is I'm not going anywhere near the place nor the person most nearly associated with the patient. It would be nicer to be of help, or just to "be there" but not in this case advisable.
I'm not even going to work, though I am working from home today. Took the dog on a five a.m. commute to go pick up my laptop, and should not infect anybody.
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