Influenza, or something like it

Please forgive mass misspellings.

I have learned something new today, influenza is way scarrier than the flu. It makes me think of Love and Death in the Time of Influenze (cholera) or of Poe poems with dainty ladies wasting away as they cough blood into their lace handkerchiefs (tuberculosis). I have beent old though that the last time influenza was life threatening was in Spain, so I'm calming down.

I woke up yesterday freezing, and thinking I had gotten a cold because the heater was off. I thought I'd take a hot shower, have some tea, and be a little late to work. After the shower and tea, I decided to work from home. After not being able to sit at the computer, I decided I'd just sleep all day. Melissa, angel of carbs, brough me orange juice and crackers, which I wasn't hungry for (and that's a sure sign that I wasn't well, me? not hungery?). Finally around 2 I had enough energy to take my temperature, and it was 103.5. I didn't think people were alive when there temp was that high.

So I was off to the emergency care department at Columbia Health Services, aided by superhero-like Joe. I left my room and one of my favorit janitors saw me and gave a "yeeck" face and helped me downstairs were on of my favortie door-ladies called me a cab. Our cabbie was way gross, and perhaps the only cab driver who drives under the speed limit in NY. He kept on building up his flem and lowering his window to spit it out. Honestly, on a 5 block ride he did it 12 times.

It turns out that emergency care isn't the bustling place you might think. Nurses like to chat and wander between patients. When we told them I had a fever they just pointed to the chairs, and even when Joe went up to tell them it was 105.5 (believe me, I was considering fake fainting to be seen) they just shrugged and went back tot alking about nurse gossip. Looking around the room, we began to rate who looked worse than me and who looked better. My only ral competition was the guy sitting across from me, he looked like death, and a girl who'd been hit by a car the ay before. It was weird, because I kept going through bouts of feeling pretty good, and I couldn't quite believe I was sick.

Finally, the nurs called me. Once she took my temperature things began to speed up. She immediatly got me a room (even the death-looking guy was sent back to chairs) and a doctor. I was eventually diagnosed with a viral infection that differentiates itself from influenza only in that my nose isn't stuffy. I left with orders for 5 day bed rest and tylenol with codeine (which at 3:37 am I am waiting for my second dose to kick in).

My sister volunteered to take me in. Now I'm on her couch alternating between sweating through my clothing and shivering so hard that I can't move. The positives and negatives; when I'm hot I can move around, though it feels like my brain is cooking, and when I'm cold my head only pounds but I can't even reach for more blankets. Tomorrow she;s making me soup, and my parents are coming in.

I don't want to point fingers, but i think I got this from Shaan. When he's not sending me to goth clubs in the lower east side he's giving me disease and either way he's trying to kill me.