oh LoLCatz...u alwayz haz appropreeate picz
Warning: If descriptions of illness and bodily issues turn you right off, this is not the post for you. But if you’re all about it, then welcome friend!
Now, I don’t really like to complain…oh, who am I kidding! I love to complain, but I do not like to complain about being sick. Most of the time, I’m able to suck it up and just do what I have to do if I have some sniffles. Unfortunately, I’ve been hit with a case of “run over by a truck” this past week, and I’m stuck at home. The worst part about it is that I had a four-day weekend due to Easter.
But what’s wrong with that, you ask.
Well, you see…in Canada, if you have a statutory holiday, you must be present at work the working day prior and the working day after any stat days in order to be paid out for said holidays. This usually isn’t a problem. Until a person is sick on one of those days. Ugh.
Needless to say, I now will likely have to use sick leave days, or my regular leave days to cover the difference.
But that’s really not what the big problem is. Being sick is such a nuisance. I have literally been sick to the point where I was on death’s doorstep. This is no exaggeration – my endocrinologist told me that if I hadn’t come into the hospital when I did to be put in ICU, I could have been dead the next day. Lesson learned and point taken. But this is the kind of sick where it teases you. Let me tell you about a day in the life of me over the past week.
I wake up to get ready for work. I jump into the shower. Okay…more like hobble into the bathroom and step carefully into the shower for fear of falling over…but whatever. So I take my shower. My stomach begins to speak to me in tongues. It says “Bona nai kachu, chuba doompa, dopa-maskey kung!”. Yeah, I wasn’t aware it could speak Huttese until this week either. I also wasn’t aware my stomach was so angry with me! Needless to say, my tummy had made an appointment to worship the porcelain gods that morning, and there was nothing I could do or say to change its mind. One observation from that…”Yummy Schwarma” may be delicious on the way down, but the reverse engineering of said meal couldn’t be more disturbing…
Calling in to work when you can barely talk is also fun. You’re never sure if your voice will work the way you want it to. So I manage to manipulate some sounds into words and let the bosses know that I won’t be in for the day. There’s only one thing I can do now. Go back to bed and lie awake since I now cannot get back to sleep with the evil Arctic sun streaming into the windows. People have suggested installing blackout shades. I have blackout shades. I think I need to install a bank vault door.
Eventually I fall asleep, only to wake to being drenched in the sweat of sickness. Do I need to ask why the body feels the need to deregulate all normalization of temperatures faster that the Republicans and Democrats held hands to deregulate the banking industry? But, since it is now around noon, I can get up and take another round of medication apparently good for four hours. With my wonderfully filling meal of yogurt and orange juice in my gullet, it is time to return to bed.
At least if the pink eye was cooperating, I could have watched a good movie or something...
Four or five hours later, I am now fully awake and can no longer toss and turn in bed. I decide that I should sit on the couch and attempt to watch television through the slits of eyelids that my newly acquired bout of pink eye has provided me with. Come to think of it, I should look up pink eye, since the only thing I know about it is that you can get it through fecal bacteria. Before the thought of that encourages my stomach to learn new languages, I do a quick search online and find out that there are in fact several ways to develop pink eye. One of which is viral – that’s how I got it. It goes hand in hand with a virus in the upper respiratory system. Mind you, I’m still unsure where that came from, but I digress.
Two boxes of kleenex later, and I have resorted to a cold washcloth and some tea bags on my eyes to encourage the pink eye to go somewhere it won’t be so intrusive. I wasn’t aware of how painful it could be. And it’s not painful like “Ow, I have daggers in my eyeballs” painful. It’s just the repetitive blowing of the nose to a state of rawness painful.
A few hours later, the illness decides to tease me. I am lulled into a false sense of security by believing I am actually starting to recover. My head does not feel as congested. My eyes are not leaking as badly as they were. I can breathe! That’s great! I can go back to work the next day!
Nope.
I basically repeat the cycle until today. I decided I felt well enough to go into work. Since I did not have my morning conversation with the cats, I had no idea how I sounded. When I got to work and my manager greeted me, I said hello and realized that I could still be gainfully employed as a 1-900 phone sex operator for another day. He gave me the look. The look of “you are going to infect all of us with your death illness – go home!”
I held out at work for an hour and a half. That was all I could manage. I feel like warm death…which always sounds so disturbing to me.
Anyway, since the pink eye is almost completely gone, I can at least see to proofread this post, and I’m typing it in bed anyway. It feels doubtful that I’ll be in to work tomorrow again, which sucks because I’m sure the work is piling up. Oh, and apparently my summer student will be starting with us next week, so lucky him! He’ll be sitting next to the devourer of Kleenex with nothing to do!
This could be me! But this woman's hair looks much nicer than I'm sure mine does at the moment...and she's not drowning in her own sweat either. Awesome.
Did I mention I hate being sick?
Oh, and I’m a nerd, but I’m not that much of a nerd. Thanks to the Wookieepedia for the translations…
Massively Attacked 