I woke up this morning thinking I could be on the upswing and wouldn't have to worry about missing out on the weekend alone that K and I have had planned in Savannah for a couple of weeks. I have to be at an Instructional Technology convention on Saturday, but we're staying both Friday and Saturday nights without the kid. I was starting to get worried that I'd still be stuck home in bed this weekend, but my 6 a.m. fever was only 101 and I hadn't taken a Tylenol dose since 11 the previous night. It wasn't until about 8 a.m. that the 75 degrees our house is currently pegged at started feeling insanely cold and I knew the fever was roaring back. 103.7 again.
Damn.
I did manage to stay awake long enough to call in an appointment to my doctor and even show up more or less on time. Turns out that I have a case of pneumonia. Fun. I haven't had that since I was a kid when I had it pretty much every other year. Actually, one of my most vivid memories from my childhood was whatever birthday I had in fifth grade (I think) and I had designed an Olympics themed birthday party for myself. Instead, I spent that weekend in the hospital with pneumonia, my birthday ruined. My family isn't really a gift giving bunch and I honestly don't remember having much in the way of a birthday after that, so that's pretty much how my childhood ended, lying in a hospital bed, watching the X Games on ESPN and wishing the remote control car my aunt had given wasn't one of the lame ones where the car was connected to the controller by a cord.
I actually have a pretty hearty immune system. I've never once caught the flu, but I can't not catch infections in my lungs or strep throat. I didn't even get sick for the six years after I left home (with one notable exception of a wicked case of food poisoning that still keeps me from considering gyros edible). The problem is exposure to children. We tend to glamorize kids as innocent, wise in their naivete and all that jazz, but the truth is that they're really just a stinking cesspool of filth and disease. They're especially smelly in 6th-8th grades. After six years of being largely healthy for the six years between my graduation from high school and my return to education on the other side of the teacher's desk, I've had at least two major bouts with strep throat and/or some major respiratory illness each of the last five years.
The moral of this story is that if you have kids, it's your fault that people get sick and die.
4 comments:
I agree. Kids are gross.
Sorry you're sick and have to miss your romantic weekend. Hope you feel better soon.
We're not going to cancel it unless we have to. I have to get in a conference for that class sometime and antibiotics usually work quickly for me. I may be tired and out of breath all weekend, but unless I'm still running a major temperature tomorrow afternoon, we're going.
You won't die. You've got a perfectly healthy immune system.
I had pneumonia once. I did not have to be hospitalized but I did have to get a shot in the butt every day for a week. Totally sucked.
I didn't say I was going to die. I had pneumonia four or five times before I was 14 and bronchitis many times more than that. This is old hat for me. I've got at least 30 more years before I die of something like this. Heck, my granddaddy smoked four packs a day for twenty years before quitting because the doctor told him he was going to die when my dad was a kid. Lung problems run in the family, but he was over 80 when he finally ran out of oxygen. I don't even smoke, so I should make at least as long as he did.
But people do get sick and die and 98.276% of them die from diseases contracted with a maximum of two degrees of separation from children.
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