Sickitating

Warning: gross being sick talk ahead.

Today is day four of Vicki's Viral Spectacular. I'm at home from work (second and a half sick day off this week, and it's only the beginning of the year!), because last night I had about 2 hours of sleep. And not good sleep--more like the hallucinatory fever sleep that comes when your body is so desperate for rest that it'll try to knock itself out with delusions of actually being knocked out by a psychotic clown wielding a giant fish.

The body is a weird and wonderful thing sometimes. You'd think it'd try not to kill you, but as my sinuses slowly filled and clogged, then decided it would be fun for all that fluid to slosh back and forth from nostril to nostril so I was alternately breathing stinging dry air on one side and not breathing at all from the other, I decided my body was actually on a mission to drive me slowly insane.

I'm happy (use big finger quotes here) that those same sociopathic sinuses have decided now's the time to drain, but as it stands, I think I've expelled a chicken farm's worth of egg whites out my nose. Where the hell is all this mucus coming from? If this was in my lungs, I'm surprised I didn't drown.

Of course, the absolute worst part of being sick is not the fever, not the chills, not the debilitating weakness you get when you touch something a degree colder than your own feverish body so that all your muscles recoil and you're hit with a bout of overpowering nausea and dizziness.

No, the absolute worst thing about being sick is being able to smell your sickness oozing from your pores. A day of lying around in your own sweat-stained pj's that you've already changed twice after three showers does not help the acrid odor of feet clinging to your skin and hair.

I hate smelling like feet. I hate smelling me at all.

I'm not the only sick person in my house right now, unfortunately--John has definitely picked something up, but he keeps powering on somehow. And poor Bowie came down with a fever last night. I can only hope the baby and parents will stay healthy, as they're scheduled to go to Boston next week. There's nothing worse than traveling while sick.

Except for traveling while smelling like feet.

Well, nothing for it but to stay home and try to preserve my workmates from this illness. Before SARS, there was a weird stigma associated with actually staying home on sick days. Even I still believe that if I can go to the doctor, I can go to work. But as I get older and it gets harder for me to recover from sickness, I'm really starting to appreciate those days lying around in delusional hazes and watching mind-numbing TV. Though lately it's been reading Pride and Prejudice to help put me to sleep.

Now if only Elizabeth Bennet's crazy antics could do something about the phlegm....