Snobby sickness.

Let me just start by admitting that there's nothing glamorous about strep throat.

There's nothing glamorous about feeling a tad...off for four days before waking up one morning at six o'clock with a raging fever. I didn't feel snobby at all. In fact, I didn't feel anything. I felt hot. And then cold. And kind of bloated in the head region. I felt achy and tired and whiny. But that's really it.

I was really NOT feeling getting up on Wednesday morning, which I had agreed to do in exchange for my weekend off. But I dragged myself out of bed, started breakfast, ate mine and then recognized defeat and collapsed onto the play room couch with my fever.

I wasn't coughing and at that point my throat didn't even hurt, but I felt blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah and it was awful.

By mid afternoon I was done.

I called T and told her so and she came home and brought her mother to help.

We were supposed to be going to the city that night for a birthday party and I had been looking forward to it. I gave all the kids naps and took one myself, but it wasn't enough; I was still deteriorating, so I gave in and went to bed and they got ready and went without me.

I woke up while they were out, still feverish and feeling the disturbance in my throat. My glands were no longer normal sized and my entire neck hurt. My shoulders hurt. My head hurt. Wah wah wah.

T said to me later that I handled being so sick pretty well and I laughed and said no I didn't. I handle the beginning of being sick well because I am in denial for the first few days. Only when the symptoms take over control of my body do I admit to being sick and then I don't even want to be around my constant reminders that I am sick and dying.

And I am always sure I am dying. I lie in bed and think about how this is probably the infection that kills me. It's just like that episode of House (choose one) and this is the end since there is no real life House to cure me. I'll go to the doctor and they'll tell me they don't know what it is and there's nothing I can do and then I'll say goodbyes to my family.

This is what I drift off to sleep thinking about.

I took DayQuil because it was all we had and I can sleep through it just fine and I took Tylenol. I hadn't been keeping track of the doses but I was pretty sure I had taken it last while T was home, which meant 4ish and when I ventured up to the kitchen it was after 7. I was ok with that timing. I got a drink of water and made some tea and went back to bed.

I woke up around 2am then and felt like I was in a sauna. I shut off my delightful electric blanket which I love to brag about and made my shaky way upstairs. It was while I was blindly stumbling up the stairs in the dark that I realized I hadn't eaten in something like 20 hours and a large part of my headache and inability to walk was probably coming from that.

The fever, however, was too busy wreaking havoc to cooperate with my plans to eat something.

I made it to the top of the stairs and laid down on the cold, tile floor. It was wonderful. As I began to nod off, cheek to tile with the dirty hallway, I thought about how funny it would be to stay there all night. Let them come down in the morning and freak out a little. But then I thought about how my headache would probably dim if I got up and ate something. And then I thought about how in another twenty minutes or so I would probably be shivering again.

So I got up and medicated myself and made some tea and drank a mango yogurt smoothie from the refrigerator and then headed back to bed. I was freezing before I got there.

Thursday morning I didn't even try to pretend I was going to work.

Around 10 T came down to make sure I was alive and to do some laundry. She could see I was clearly ill with something awful, and so was her husband. Meanwhile, all three kids had runny noses and J had been leaking at the ears for a few days. She was about to pour bleach all over every towel any of us had touched that week.

She told me I should take an extra two days and head home immediately. Or at the very least go to a doctor in New York and get antibiotics. The message was basically that I was unwelcome to stay in the house with her in my current state. She sent the same message to the rest of her family and then disinfected the entire house.

I made some calls and fuzzy-minded prayers and when I had decided to go home I went upstairs to tell her.

All the windows were open. She had sent E to the doctor and the kids to their grandmother's. The baby was half-dressed, since his clothes had been added to the burn pile and she had scrubbed him down, too. She wasn't even cleaning with the natural stuff that we usually use. She had the hard core stuff and she meant business.

With the spray nozzle in hand, just in case I got too close, she asked me if I had decided to go home. I said yes. She said good and then ordered me to eat something.

My throat had swollen already and I started to say that I had had some smoothie at two am and was fine, but she opened the fridge and started giving me my options.

Not only was I not allowed to get her sick, but I was also not allowed to die and leave her alone with three kids and another one on the way. She's so funny.

I ate some Cheerios with dairy free milk because I love dairy free milk. I don't love fruity Cheerios but I couldn't taste them anyway. And once they were soggy they didn't hurt my throat too bad.

I went to shower and pack.

And then T's mom came over.

I may have told you a bit about her during T's sickness. She's very caring and helpful and full of old Persian remedies. She force fed us both sweet lemons, which are neither sweet nor lemony. They taste like oranges that taste like crap. I'm sorry, oranges that have lost their flavor but then leave an aftertaste; of crap.

She asked me what I had eaten, wasn't satisfied, told me to drink more tea and then stuffed a bunch of citrus into my suitcase. She topped it off with a dry soup mix and a vegetable I didn't recognize and told me to eat it at my mother's house if I wanted to live.

I thanked her and T drove me to the train.

I took a bus from the city and when I got on it I was sweating and tired. Halfway through the ride I was chilling again and I was angry, so angry, that I was sitting on a bus. I started to daydream about demanding that they pull the bus over and Medivac me to the nearest flu treatment center. I thought about closing my eyes and falling asleep on the shoulder of the woman beside me, but I have an easier time doing that with men for some reason.

Instead, she fell asleep and snored like my mother (sorry Mom) and made me all the more irritable about still being on the bus and not off it and anywhere else, anywhere at all.

I was certain that it was warmer outside than on the bus and as my toes went numb and I started to shiver again I cursed the gods of Martz for trying to kill me.

It wasn't any warmer outside or in the bus station waiting room and so I was certain that the problem was me. I got a cup of the worst coffee I've ever consumed from a vending machine but I needed something hot to hold and ingest or I was going to succumb to hypothermia in that subzero bus station weather. Swallowing it made me want to hurt something small and innocent, but once it was down I felt slightly warmer.

Then Mom came and we went to the Emergency Care Clinic, oh the blessed clinic. They gave me a prescription and I whooped and hollered and waved it in the air.

Actually, the faxed it over and by the time we got to the pharmacy it was already in. Oh happy day!!

I took everything they gave me and then everything Mom gave me and ate dinner and beat Mom in a few card games and hit the hay. The glorious hardwood hay.

I was up in the night there too, but nothing was as dramatic as that night back in NY had been. I won't bore you with Friday or Saturday's details, but I will tell you that running home to Mommy was the smartest thing I've ever done. Mommy just so happens to be in a new house and eager to entertain so she waited on me and brought me all my meals. Aside from her additions to the list of disgusting things I had to ingest to make me better, my time there was the best part of being sick.

I just laid there yelling how awful I felt and she ignored me unless it was meal time. It's nice to know no matter where you go in life there will always be someone you can whine and complain and yell to who won't pay you the least bit of attention. And I mean that. She knows I just need to be loud and she doesn't come running every time I add a new symptom to the list. Especially if that symptom is "there's nothing on TV."

Saturday night we went to see my sister in her newest play, Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Shawnee Playhouse (shameless plug) but before that we had a birthday tea at my brother's house. His wife hosted and made everything and we spent the afternoon over stuffing ourselves and talking and laughing, getting in the mood for the play that night, which was hilarious and also really, really well done (shameless boasting).

Sunday I got to visit my home church, the congregation I grew up in and all the friends I've left behind there. The best part is I got to hug several of them, but it was really sad to see how many aren't there anymore. My BFFFFFFFFFFF and her family moved to North Carolina after I moved to NY. It was weird, even though I knew they wouldn't be there, to sit in our old row and not have them in front of me.

After church I had a much needed nap and then visited some old family friends who are saying sad goodbyes to their elderly doggie, who is my favorite doggie of all time.

I was almost entirely well again when I got on the bus that night. I got a good seat by a window and then the bus started to fill up so I moved my giant purse and let someone sit down. Someone turned out to be an amazingly nice looking Hispanic man about my age (probably a year or two younger if I'm being honest, but I'm not. He was my age, mine) who called his mom to let her know he was on his way just as I was texting mine that I had made it onto the bus.

Something triggered a conversation and we chatted for a while before I read a little bit and went to sleep against the window. I woke up on his shoulder and he was asleep too. Like I said, for some reason, this happens much easier when I sit next to men on the bus. I apologized and wondered if I had been snoring but was relieved to see I hadn't drooled.

When we FINALLY go to New York, I had missed my train and had an hour to kill before the next one. I spent it standing in Penn Station and wondering about the sanity of two thirds of the people around me. On my train I accidentally selected a small quiet, isolated corner, perfect for smothering your victims without interruption, and I sat down. A man sat down across from me even though there were ten other seats and just stared at me with a kind of lazy eye and crooked smile.

Forty minutes of that, and my night was complete.

He nodded off, still smiling crookedly, and I had to lift my suitcase over his legs and them climb over as well when it was time to leave because I had no need for his farewell smiles.

Today has been pretty normal except I am experiencing severe lethargy as a side effect of my life. It may be recovering from the weekend is taking longer than anticipated, perhaps it's the meds, or maybe I just didn't get enough sleep last night. But I spent the late morning giving the baby questioning looks when he did weird things and then laughing at him laughing at my looks. He's one funny monkey.

J is much better and his ears have stopped leaking. E went back to work today and T made it through our entire plague without catching anything.

I spent today doing all the laundry I could find to rid our beds and the house of any leftover germs and reading and rereading the label on my antibiotics, trying to pronounce it so I can request it for next time.

Amazing stuff. Amazing.