Author Archives: momdude

Sorry, still sick. I was really thinking yesterday that this would be pretty much over by tonight. Instead it took a turn about noon and got worse again. Fever high, coughing nonstop, sore throat, blinding headache. I honestly started wondering if I was going to break a rib from all of the coughing. I googled how high the fever needs to be before you need to go to the ER in the middle of the night. (Mayo Clinic says 103° if you have convulsions or any one of a number of other symptoms, which I don’t…yet.)

So yes, it’s time to throw my schedule into even more disarray. No work for me at the CAF hangar tomorrow, I don’t want to share this with a couple hundred folks. No belated Father’s Day dinner on Sunday with my daughter and her fiance and his dad – again, trying to not be a plague carrier. And I really, REALLY need to be able to go back to work on Monday. We’re a small office and I was already out for three days last week when I went to Vermont – missing three days this week causes problems.

It says a lot that the thing that is upsetting me the most is the disruption of my schedule and how I’m now behind on my work work and my CAF work. It’s that whole Catholic, Puritan work ethic, Midwest upbringing thing. Which, I’m trying to remember, is the sort of thing that lost Jim Henson for us.

Drugs are us, and if that doesn’t work by tomorrow night, probably a return visit to Urgent Care. Or, if I hit 103° (sort of like Marty McFly hitting 88 mph in the DeLoreon with the flux capacitor activated), the ER.

Perspective is important. It’s not Ebola, or cancer, or even Lyme disease. It’s a fucking cold. It’s the worst fucking cold that I’ve had in decades, but still…

This is SO inconvenient!

I hate being sick.

Yesterday I showed the results of an encounter in the back yard and suggested it was better to be the hawk than the mourning dove.

Right now I’m the mourning dove.

I hate being sick.

I hate how you’re fine one day, then you’ve got a little cough, then sniffles, and twenty-four hours later you’re hacking up a lung, running a fever of 101° and change and you feel like…the mourning dove.

It’s boring. Aside from the physical discomfort, if there are things you have to do and you’re not quite ready for the ICU then you have to soldier through those things and the rest of the time just lie about, not able to really get to sleep, not able to really wake up, hungry but not feeling like eating anything, forcing yourself to stay hydrated but not able to drink anything you like (such as the gift from the gods, Diet Coke) so everything is just BLAAAAAHHHHH!

And while I have plenty of sick time to take (I know that some don’t have that luxury) and some great staff to cover while I’m out (again, a luxury many don’t have), it still means that I’ll be behind and up to my ass in alligators when I got back to the office.

I hate being sick!