Still Alive
I’ve been sick since Sunday, only starting to feel a little better now. I guess this is going to happen a couple of weeks after I get a flu shot, this is the second time now.
The flu vaccine does inject a small does of the virus into the body. It’s not normally supposed to make you actually get sick, but it does for me. A couple of weeks later, and I’m not sure why.
This happened back in 2008. I got a seasonal flu shot near the end of October, so I could be sure not to be sick for one of the premier events of the craft-brewing year, the Maine Brewers’ Festival. And I was fine for the event.
The next day, on the way home, we stopped at Federal Jack’s Brewpub in Kennebunk for lunch, as we always do on the way home from Portland. I was fine there, too.
So we got home about an hour and a half later. As we approached the house, I had to ask Mike to stop and let me out near the front door. He did, I unlocked the door, ran inside, nearly tripping over cats, went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and gacked. If I’d had to walk from the parking space out back to the front door, I’d likely have gacked on the sidewalk. That is, if I didn’t gack in the car first.
It wasn’t food poisoning from Federal Jack’s, it takes a lot longer than 90 minutes for that to take effect. It was the flu, it was nasty as it always is…but it only lasted for a few days, not for weeks on end, as it did in my pre-flu shot days.
And that’s what happened this time, too. We were out all day Saturday, I was fine. At 5AM on Sunday, I got up and gacked. I stayed in bed all day Sunday and then again all day Monday. I gacked a couple of times on Monday, too. But then I couldn’t sleep on Monday night, and ended up sleeping almost all day on Tuesday.
I had been watching TV in the bedroom, first Rachael Ray, which started with a segment I could have done without, all about colon stuff, colonoscopies, colon cleanse benefits, that sort of thing. It was kind of gross…if I wanted to see that on a talk show, I’d flip the channel over to Dr. Oz. He shows gross stuff, such as pictures of actual colons and other innards, too…but it being a medical show, you expect that. My tummy was a little too sensitive to deal with colons, yanno?
Martha Stewart came on at 10, and I watched that. What that was over, I switched over to channel 4 for “The Price is Right”, because I didn’t feel like watching “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” After TPIR, the local news and then the CBS soaps come on, but I fell asleep and missed them all. I was planning to get up and throw the stuph for the spaghetti sauce into the slow-cooker, so that Mike wold have something to eat. But I didn’t wake up until he came home, and it was too late. He had to scrounge up something else to eat.
But my fever had broken, and I woke up all sweaty. I decided I felt well enough to take my first shower since Saturday, and it did help make me feel better.
So now I’m behind on a lot of stuph, and am trying to see how long I can sit in this chair before I get tired again. All that time in bed made my lower back seriously hurt.
But the worst has passed, and we should be able to go to that beer dinner up in Portsmouth on Sunday!
