Sick Note

We had a wonderful vacation, thanks for asking. Dear Wife’s folks recently moved from the Bay Area to Ventura, further down the California coast and we hadn’t seen their new house before. Their garden is a paradise for bird lovers like them and I spent a lot of time simply sitting outdoors reading. We still found time to explore some of the small towns nearby, sample numerous restaurants and take some long walks on the beach so it even felt like a real vacation.

Coming home, with all the real world entrapments such as bills, laundry and work is never much fun but at least the dogsters were pleased to see us. (Although not quite as pleased as we’d assumed – it seems we’d made a good choice of boarding kennels.) Still, by Sunday night my shoes were polished, my lunch was made up and my laptop was sitting by the door, ready for another week in the salt mines. I was feeling rather tired so headed off to bed early, ready to be bright and cheery come Monday morning. Well OK, that was never going to happen, but you know what I mean.

By 2am I was awake again and paying a visit to the bathroom. No biggie, I’m sliding kicking and screaming towards middle age and they tell me this is the sort of thing I can expect. Most nights I can get up, take care of business and be back in bed without really waking so I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Until around 4am, when I thought about it a lot. Not only was I now wide awake, it was becoming increasingly obvious I was going to be spending a lot more time in the smallest room in the house.

Even at that point however, it didn’t occur to me there was anything majorly wrong. I figured there was just some kind of icky stomach bug in there and all I needed to do was ride things out until it passed, then head into work, perhaps an hour or two later than normal. By 6am I was aware that whatever else the day might have in store for me, sitting at my desk and catching up on e-mail wasn’t going to be it. Shivering and aching, I was huddled beneath the covers wondering if I was going to live through this. By 7am I was wondering if I really wanted to.

Remember the chariot scene in Ben Hur? Remember the bit where the bad guy falls out and gets trampled by the horses as they drag him around the Circus Maximus. Well, I could empathize with him. (If you don’t remember that bit of the movie don’t bother renting it just for the refresher – those few minutes don’t justify the tediousness of the rest.) My whole body, head to toe felt as if it had received a good kicking, while my stomach and intestines appeared to be full of break-dancing flamingoes.

Thinking it might settle my innards and replace some lost fluids, Dear Wife made me a cup of mint tea. It tasted quite refreshing but I managed only a few mouthfuls before heading straight back to the throne room. I’ve never really looked that closely at the inside of our toilet before; it’s really quite unattractive although I did send up a silent prayer of thanks that I’d cleaned it just before we left for vacation.

Fortunately, by midday I was pretty well hollow so was able to devote my energies to squirming around the bed in discomfort. Whatever kind of cooties I had inside me, they were certainly having one big old party and were presumably enjoying the day a lot more than I was. Weak and trembling I may have been, but they were full of energy and ready to play.

By day 2 the pain and discomfort had subsided somewhat and while I still felt as though I’d been put through a wringer, I had at least regained enough strength to work the remote control on the TV. However, I’m not sure if that did anything to aid my recovery. There really is an astonishing amount of dreck on American television. The programming itself is bad enough but every five or six minutes each channel takes a commercial break, the sole purpose of which (as far as I could tell) was to promote the other garbage the channel shows. Mind you, I finally learned just who the hell Nick and Jessica are, although I’m still unclear as to why I should care. If nothing else, that was an incentive to stay employed.

That afternoon I was able to eat a slice of dry toast and miraculously it stayed down. Later still I managed a few chunks of melon. Maybe I was going to survive this after all. The biggest challenge by this time was that even though I felt completely exhausted, my total lack of physical exertion during the day meant that when night finally came, sleep was impossible and I spent the next few hours, flipping and flopping trying to get comfortable while I waited for morning.

On day 3, propped in a cocoon of pillows, I was able to sit with my laptop on my lap (has anyone ever done that before I wonder?) and take a look at some of my work e-mail. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared and I was pleased to receive a number of solicitous enquiries after my health. A fair number of those were along the lines of "Oh, you’re back. Good. Can you do this for me?" but on the whole, it seemed as though I’d genuinely been missed. I didn’t last the whole day of course, there’s no point in being home on the sick if you’re just going to work but I did make significant headway. At least until 'Dr. Phil' came on and I had to go to sleep.

Thursday morning found me back in the office. Early Thursday afternoon found me heading home feeling like a wet dishrag and wondering if Angus’ steering wheel has always been so heavy. It didn’t help that the entire population of Colorado had decided to take off early for the 4th of July and were sitting in front of me. But I slept the sleep of the innocent (a refreshing experience) on Thursday night and by Friday I was up and ready to take on the world.

A good job too. If there’s one thing worse than being sick, it’s being sick on a holiday weekend.