Tag: flu

The Black Plague: Day Twenty-One

It’s official.  The flu/cold/plague symptoms have now been with us for three full weeks.  Hoo-freakin’-Ray!

After visiting the emergency room last week, Jen was not seeing any improvement so she went to see her primary care.  He gave a better explanation of the situation and prescribed yet another new antibiotic (her fourth since this all started) and a steroid.  Nice.  My wife is going to smash the long ball, just like Barry Bonds!

I’m still congested.  I still have a cough.  Neither is as bad as it was three weeks ago, but they are all still sticking around.  I had a bit of a tough night sleeping last night.  The cough woke me up a couple of times.  Last week I thought I was 90% well.  Now I’ll put it at 70% well.  My health is currently getting a C-.

We are having a post-holiday, holiday party with Larry and Mike and families this weekend.  I am going to be well enough to go to that party, even if it kills me!  My health needs to be at least at a C+.  I can do it.  Hear that, immune system?  I have confidence that you can stop sucking just enough for me to spend an evening with my family and my friends all in the same place together.  You can do it, immune system.  You can do it!

Did you hear that hockey is coming back?  (yes, that was a sudden change of subject)  Baseball pitchers and catchers are less than two months away from reporting to spring training as well.  The days of no sports to watch but football (yawn) and basketball (zzz zzz zzz) are coming to an end.I am still furious with the NHL.  That is not going to go away.  When it comes to holding a grudge about pro sports labor disputes, I am the king.  I am still fuming over the 1981 baseball players strike.  Because of that stupid thing, the stats on my 1982 Topps baseball cards did not include 162 games for that season.  Dwight Evans only got to play something like 104 games.  That sucked and I’m still pissed.

Anyway, I think one of the reasons why I am so much more upset about this lockout than the last one (don’t get me wrong, I was steaming with rage last time too) is that last time I had an AHL team to distract me.  The Lowell Lock Monsters.  Eric Staal.  Chuck Kobasew (sp? sorry Chuck).  Damn, what a great team we had that year.  While everyone else was boiling over with rage about not having hockey, there were maybe one thousand or so people in the Greater Lowell area who had Monsters season tickets.  No, it was not the same as having the NHL, but it did keep our hockey minds occupied for that black hole of a season.

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I could have followed Worcester, or Providence this time, but I still have that old Lowell loyalty. Be it the Lock Monsters or the Devils that replaced them, I loved AHL hockey in Lowell. For the record, there was no way I would ever have followed Manchester. That would be like rooting for the Yankees in the Red Sox absence. It would never, ever happen. In fact, I talked to my gorgeous wife Jennifer about maybe going to a game in Manchester, but I made it clear I would be rooting for the visiting team.

Lock Monster hockey, it’s alive! (or at least it was back then when I needed it)

Sickness Continues for Both of Us

Yesterday I felt like dung.  Today I feel like dung again.  Sniffles, sneezing, lots of coughing, stuffy head, post nasal drip, all sorts of garbage like that.

Still, it doesn’t measure up to what we feared about my wife yesterday.

Jen has had a rough time with antibiotics lately.  After stopping her course of antibody number two, she had a nasty headache on Wednesday.  Yesterday evening it came back, along with some weird sensations on her face.  The emergency room was recommended by her doctor’s office.  It turned out to be just another mild illness piled on top of the other nastiness she’s been fighting off for three weeks or so.  She’s okay, just not feeling terribly well.

They took her out of the room to do some tests and I fought my nerves by playing with hipstamatic… as usual.

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I even took a creepy hipsta-selfie.
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Today we get to see how the new antibiotic goes.  Her work schedule is very full today, so I haven’t heard anything from her.  I sent her a “how ya feelin'” email, but no word yet.  I take that as a good thing.  If she were feeling sick she’d tell me.

I love her.

I adore her.

I want her to be feeling better.

 

 

A Crappy Couple of Weeks

You know what?  These last two weeks or so have pretty much sucked.  Christmas and Christmas Eve celebrations have been the only bright spots in an otherwise ugly period of time.

First I got sick with what was probably the flu.  Immediately after that, my wife got sick with what appeared to be the same bug.  We still had a lot of Christmas shopping and prepping to go but we spent most of the week prior to the holiday in a nyquil induced haze of uselessness.  Entire days were spent in bed trying to sleep through the illnesses.

Near the end of last week Jen started improving.  A day or so later I started to slowly improve.  We scrambled through the end of the Christmas shopping, and started getting ready for the Christmas Eve party, but for the most part it was just a struggle to keep ourselves up and at ’em.  Once I started to feel a tiny bit better, Jen started feeling worse.  Oh great.  Christmas Eve came and she fought her way through the cooking and hosting like a trooper.  Christmas day she did the same, all while getting sicker and sicker.  We both felt like Santa was at less than his best this year.  Jen took care of all of it, and I am dazzled by the success she had, but I feel like I could have been more helpful, and if we hadn’t lost that week to the flu we could have made some of the kids’ last minute gift wishes come true.  That was a big part of the problem this year, the kids took their sweet time putting together a wish list and in the end my step son was still asking for things as late as 12/23, and then come Christmas morning he was expecting to get those things.  He tried to act like he wasn’t disappointed, but we could tell he was a little bit.  Next year I need to do a better job getting a list to Santa out of them both as early as humanly possible.  I might have them start taking notes on ideas for next year, tonight.

Don’t get me wrong, Christmas was a big success.  Everyone was happy.  I just feel like I should have contributed more, and I failed to surprise Jen at all.  She got great stuff.  It’s just that everything she got was on her wish list.  I didn’t manage to wow her with anything.  As for the kids, the last paragraph makes it sound like they got socks and underwear and nothing else.  That’s not true.  They got new iPads!  They got awesome games.  They got books that they are going to love.  They got a lot of great stuff.  I just wanted to do better by them and I couldn’t because I spent the week leading up to Christmas as a flu riddled basket case.

So maybe you’re asking, this is all in the past.  Why is that fat red head saying that he’s still having a bad week?  Well for me, New Years is ruined because of work.  I’m on call all day, and they are guaranteed to work my fat ass off all day and night.  It’s going to suck.  I still have a lingering cold and cough.  Not bad, but it is still there.  As for Jen?  Oh nothing.  Just fricken walking pneumonia, that’s all.  She kept getting sicker so she went to the doctor yesterday and got the news.  Pneumonia!  Are you serious?  How bad does that suck!  She feels really sick and she is just miserable about it.  I feel miserable because I’m here at work and not at home rubbing her feet and cooking her some Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup.  I should be home with her right now, but instead I am here working.  I hate it.

So what it comes down to is this.  This week and last week have sucked in many ways.  I am hopeful that things will start turning around soon, but the next few days still may be a continuance of the current suck fest.

Send some get well wishes to my beautiful bride.  She’s an angel and she needs to feel better soon.

The Black Plague: Day Two

I’m still sick. I was hoping to be well enough to go back to work today, but its not happening. I spent the whole day in bed yesterday. I slept a lot, and the rest of the time I just lay there with my eyes closed. I tried to keep myself hydrated, but its tough to drink clear liquids when you are asleep. In did my best though.

I’m going to head back to bed now until its time to call work. I didn’t eat anything yesterday, so maybe after I call in I might try a piece of bread or something.

Want to hear the best part of all of this? Jen has it too. She left work early yesterday and called in this morning. Merry freakin’ Christmas.