This is going to sound strange, and perhaps I’ve been reading too much science fiction and fantasy lately, but I think I woke up Victorian.
I’ve been getting steadily, normally sick for days – pesky cough, lumpy sore throat. Nothing unusual. Still, feeling particularly crappy on Friday, I called in too sick to risk getting the kids sick. I felt stuffy all day but rallied enough to hang out with Stuart when he got home late from work, and eat a couple slices of pizza.
With which I then parted ways, rather irrevocably and violently, at 4 in the morning*.
When I finally got back to sleep after much sipping slowly of water (not even ginger ale in the house!), we slept until 2PM. And I woke up mal du spleen, in the blacke humoures, or with some other vague fainting-couch type illness.
Coughy, headachy, weak as a kitten after triple bypass, achy, tingly, and did I mention, lest you just think this is a cold, my stomach? My stomach felt like someone had poured still-wet concrete into it. Bloated, rumbly and sloshy.
See how all my symptoms end in -y? No good can come of a diagnosis where all the symptoms end in -y. I tried to get some sleep early, around 11, but I’d been quietly sipping too much diet Coke (not around in 1875 London) to really fall into Nod.
Without a real temperature or, not being in any serious pain, and you know, without any REAL SYMPTOMS, I’m left with Pepto for the tummy concrete, Advil for the aches body and head, and Robitussin for the itchy cough. And the Internet for distraction. Four cures that should be able to beat out any Victorian vaguaries and an unexpected case of suddenly turning into some fluttering hand-on-forehead maiden.
But hey, armchair MDs, diagnose away. I’m still sort of hoping it’s my spleen.
* it’s gross, but critical at this juncture, to note that my body has a bizarre but effective habit of promptly jettisoning any food it disagrees with. The only sense in which this is disturbing is when there’s nothing tangibly wrong with the food.