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sickness routines Thursday, March 15 2007
Today was day two of being bedridden, and by now I'd fallen into a set of routines. I'd take 400 or 600 mg of Ibuprofen every time I start feeling the headaches and joint pains starting to overwhelm me, but not more than ever four hours. Sometimes, though, I'd be thrashing in discomfort as those last few minutes ticked away. I was enforcing these dosage limits on myself, out of concern for my liver or whatever it is Ibuprofen destroys when you take too much of it. The Ibuprofen would return me to a state of relative comfort within an hour and a half, and it would also bring my fever down a degree or two from where it wanted to be: 102 F. To get my temperature down, though, my body didn't seem to have any available mechanism other than sweating, and if I was sleeping at the time (as I normally would be if I was "comfortable"), all my clothes would be soaked by the time I awoke. So I kept a rotating supply of various shirts hanging to dry on the bannister beside the stairway outside the bedroom door. (My pajama bottoms never became wet enough to require such rotation.)
Given our constant loud fits of coughing and the various supplies we needed scattered within arm's reach, Gretchen and I couldn't sleep together. So Gretchen, who was not yet completely recovered from her illness, slept out on the couch in the teevee room, as she had been doing since she was first stricken. As for me, I was hardly alone in my bed. I was usually joined by both dogs and Marie the cat (aka "the Baby"). Occasionally either Julius or Clarence would join me, but I only ever wanted to snuggle with Clarence. Julius wasn't so bad, but he was mostly just a useless lump on the bed and didn't want to get under the covers. As for Marie the Baby, she mostly just wanted to crouch on four painful pegs high on my chest, which lead me to subconsciously think she was the cause of the wheezing that kept building to a rattle within my lungs. I'd cough up a plug of phlegm (usually pink and opaque), spit it into a tissue, and try to go to sleep. It took me hours to learn that the rattle wouldn't develop anywhere near as quickly if I lay on my side instead of on my back.
At some point I mustered the strength to take a bath, but near its end I feared I'd pass out while attempting to climb out. Rising from the bath seems to be one of the most stressful things I regularly do to my body. Evidently all the blood in my skin, drawn by the hot water, leaves little for my brain when I stagger to my feet. I've been known to pass out, particularly when ill. This time, however, I managed to pilot myself back upstairs to bed without crashing.
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