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old man sounds from the teevee room couch
Thursday, December 18 2025
In the middle of the night, Charlotte the Dog joined me on the couch, which is very unusual behavior for her. She will almost never join me if it's just me to join; normally I have to be accompanied by Neville, Gretchen, or both of them for her to do that. I wondered if perhaps she could sense that I was sick and was feeling empathetic.
I slept fitfully, of course, what with all the coughing and the discomforts associated with having a fever. At some point I measured my temperature and it was as high as 101.5, so I kept myself on a regime of 400mg of ibuprofen no more than once every four hours. That's a little more than what doctors recommend, but at the end of a four-hour period without ibuprofen, the discomfort gets to the point where you have to do something.
Gretchen had me take a covid test this morning, and, to my surprise, the result was that whatever I have is not covid. At this point, I don't feel like covid is any worse for me than a case of the flu, but such distinctions are still important to other people, particularly those I might infect or been infected by.
I ended up spending the entire day on that teevee room couch, getting up only to piss in the toilet off the nearby bedroom. Not only did I not go outside, but I didn't even go down to the main floor of the house. Gretchen brought me a few things to eat, particularly leftover rice and small peanut butter sandwiches, which was about all I had the stomach for. Despite fairly extreme misery, I was able to play Spelling Bee and briefly check in at my usual web haunts.
Originally Gretchen had planned to have Ray and Nancy over for dinner tonight, but it would be cruel to expose anyone to the sort of disease I had, so she canceled it. I noticed that Gretchen had also begun coughing, indicating she'd managed to get my disease despite our efforts to stay mostly separated. Other than getting me things, she mostly kept in some distant corner of the house, though she did come up to watch Jeopardy! with me at one point, and at the time it was a welcome distraction from my misery, though all I could do was moan an occasional answer at the teevee.
By this evening I was coughing up huge chunks of phlegm; they seemed to be one or two cubic centimeters in size. Gretchen hated the old man sounds I would made to produce these, but I really didn't have a choice; not clearing my lungs could've led to pneumonia. So I felt a little resentful as she kept trying to get me to cough and hawk loogies in a quieter way. It seemed unrealistic to expect a sick man to be able to do that.
I took some diphenhydramine (along with dextromethorphan and pretty much all the other OTC cold & flu drugs) and that knocked me out so completely that when I later awoke at 8:00pm, I thought I'd made it all the way to 8:00am on Friday.
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