The Arena of the Unwell
Double-post from Blogspot - all the gruesome details of the weekend!
Hurrah!! Margaret and Catherine were out till 3:30 on Saturday night!! Par-TYYYYY!!!!!!!
Well.
Not exactly.
It all started on Thursday afternoon, with the INCREDIBLY AMBITIOUS Religious Ed class. I was listening to Revels on Wednesday night, thinking, "oh, wouldn't it be fun to teach them something about old Christmas traditions?" and ended up planning a lesson in which I would teach them a Wassailing song and move them around the room to different pictures with Advent and Christmas symbols on them and have them wassail the pictures before handing out treats (Christmas cards) in exchange for correct information about the pictures.
Well, the entire class was having a bad day, with lots of snarkiness and tattling, and so they didn't exactly want to pay attention to learn the song, especially since they'd all completely zoned out and hadn't heard my introduction about what Wassailing was. I ended up re-starting the lesson, once I realised the information hadn't penetrated, and there was a terrifying moment where I thought I'd lost them completely and was going to have to rethink the whole thing and maybe even send them off to their desks to do busywork instead of the fun activity.
But I managed to pull it out and we actually ended up having fun; however, it was stressful and bad, and I'd spent my free period AND my lunch period putting together the pictures, so I was stressed out beyond belief ALREADY.
And it got worse after school, because Friday was my last day and I wanted to bring in a cake. They're learning about Instructions in Literacy, so I was thinking it would be fun to read instructions for making a cake, and then produce the cake out of the supply closet.
Apparently, this country has something against cake mix. I wasn't ABOUT to make a cake from scratch, especially since our fridge has been broken for a week, so all our eggs and milk and butter have gone off (and our diet has consisted almost entirely of cheap takeaway and water - I don't want to THINK about what vitamin deficiencies I'm courting, but my lifestyle is becoming frighteningly similar to Seth and Tom's.) but I searched high and low in three off-licences, CostCutter, Marks and Spencer, Tesco (YES, I went into TESCO) and the Sainsbury's in Dalston, and there was NO CAKE MIX TO BE FOUND.
So I thought, "okay, I'll just buy a pre-made cake and some icing, and they can ice their own at their tables, and that will be FUN." ... NO ICING. ANYWHERE. There was all the CUSTARD and BRANDY BUTTER I could have hoped for, but NO ICING.
So I just said, "SCREW IT," and bought a chocolate roll with vanilla swirls, and trudged back to the Dalston train station, missing the train by thirty seconds.
I then spent the next twenty minutes listening to perky announcements informing me that the 17.59 train to Stratford was delayed by five ... then six ... then seven minutes, and that "Silverlink apologises" for the delay.
Given that it was about thirty degrees out, pitch black, and with gale-force winds blowing, I did not really give a damn what Silverlink apologised for, especially in that perky pre-recorded voice.
The train eventually did arrive, and I made it home and COLLAPSED. Waking up on Friday, my first thought was that anybody who tried to talk to me before I'd had a hot shower and some orange juice was going to die, my second thought was that the only orange juice we had had been sitting out for a week and a half, and my third thought was that I wish I'd inherited my father's sinuses instead of my mother's, because I thought my head was going to explode. Three painkillers, two decongestants, and a swig of warm-and-probably-alcoholic-by-this-point orange juice, I was on my way to work, thinking that vegetables were actually a GOOD life choice, and I should probably have had some this last week, considering that I was pulling nineteen-hour days and being exposed to cold and windy weather.
Around 3:00 on Friday, I started feeling floaty and woozy, but was so caught up in saying good-bye to the kids and managing the manic good-bye party (that ended up being combined with one of the kids' birthday parties when their parents descended unannounced on the classroom with two cakes, candles, decorations, a camera, and a minimal command of the English language) that I couldn't really pay attention. I cleaned up, packed up, walked home with my good-bye card full of kid-art and my potted plant (what IS IT with the British obsession with leafy potted plants???), took a hot shower, and collapsed into bed, thinking something along the lines of "oh, shiiiiit ..."
The flatmate came home at 7:30, shouted "congratulations on finishing Block Practice!! Let me take you to dinner!!" and was met with incoherant groans from the darkened room populated by the Snot Monster from the Planet Flu.
We did not go to dinner that night. I did not eat dinner that night. My throat was so sore and my glands so swollen that I could barely manage to eat three spoonfuls of the soup I sent the flatmate out to get at Tesco's at midnight when I woke momentarily from my bizarre floaty dreamworld. (Incidentally, the flatmate claims that the population of Tesco's at midnight on a Friday is an interesting sociological Freak Parade.) My forehead was freezing, I was sweating constantly, I alternated between being boiling hot and feeling as though I'd been dipped in ice water, and every muscle and joint in my body felt as though it would fall off if it were touched.
I slept on and off for about eighteen hours, waking sporadically throughout Saturday morning to deliver various messages to the flatmate, such as "take the fucking books back to the Hackney library before they come after us with search dogs" and "get me some decongestant from the chemist's that's specifically for colds, because this Benadryl Allergy stuff is shit" and "eat all my chocolate because you've earned it because you're wonderful and your mum was right when she said you would have been a good nurse" and "I don't deserve you" and "what would I do without you" and "I really don't think I'm making it to that Christmas slash bash in Buckinghamshire, but you're free to go without me" and "holy shit, somebody have mercy and kill me, please."
So I blame my 11:30 decision to go to the Christmas slash bash in Buckinghamshire ENTIRELY on the fact that I was high as a kite on paracetemol and had been drinking half-frozen orange juice that I'd stored in the freezer all morning.
Buckinghamshire is gorgeous, and J'hanna (the hostess) has just bought a lovely little semi-detached all by herself, which means that she has a READING ROOM, and the house looks out over an apple orchard, and is five minutes' walk from the Midgham train station, which is an easy connection from Reading, (though the bloke at the information desk at Paddington gave us a very odd look when we asked when the next train to Midgham was, before saying "are you sure? NOBODY goes to Midgham.") so the trip was actually very easy.
Unlike the Halloween party, this slash bash did NOT get stuck on an endless loop of "oh, did you read that story? Yeah, she wrote the other one, and it was a crossover, based on her Christmas challenge last year, of course you remember, and her LJ said this and that..." and on and on about shows I haven't seen and authors I haven't read. Instead, the conversation went on about our lives, politics, slash, new scientific research on whether people with a certain gene are more inclined to be religious than people without, London markets, whether you could take a Christmas tree on the tube, David Hewlitt being naked in movies I hadn't heard about but now want to see, Queer as Folk UK versus Queer as Folk US, CHOCOLATE, the delicious mince pies J'hanna had made, whether you'd get hot chocolate tea or sludge if you dropped a truffle into a cup of tea, Midsummer parties, roasting a side of beef on a spit on a London sidewalk, and various other things.
I actually sat pretty much all day - on the train and at the party - so I congratulated myself for being gentle with my recovering-from-illness self while also managing to enjoy my weekend, and I gave myself an extra pat on the back for working the Christian Science Act (when I will myself into feeling better very quickly, so as not to miss something fun) yet again.
Except that as we got off the train in London on the way back, I suddenly felt VERY VERY VERY ILL, and started shaking uncontrollably. According to Catherine, I went GREY, and my heart rate went up to about 112 beats per minute (my normal resting rate is around 70) and I was unable to draw a breath because my glands were so swollen and I was shaking so hard. I went FREEZING COLD and began sweating again, and was experiencing a certain amount of vertigo, so I sat down on the nearest bench trying to get it together to go home.
Catherine eventually convinced me that I'd freaked her out enough that we should go to the hospital, which, conveniently, was two blocks away, and which, conveniently, I knew my way around, having worked there two years ago.
"You sound like you have mono," Catherine said. "You haven't had a fever, and you have all these extra non-flu symptoms, and the last time you had mono, your body freaked out completely and you got HIVES, for God's sake."
"NOBODY gets HIVES with mono," I said, "and yet ... I do."
"Yeah, we're going to the hospital," she replied.
So we checked in with the nurse who does triage, and she basically thought I was making it all up, and had never even heard of mono, and I had to convince her that I would feel a lot better about the whole "I wasn't able to breathe and my heart rate is very very high and yet I don't have a fever and this is weird and bad and kind of scary" thing if I were able to see a doctor. I spent my childhood being told that I was making up my symptoms to get attention and to stay home from school (and a lot of the time I *was*), so I have trouble now knowing when I'm being an alarmist and when it's actually genuine, but I think this warranted some late-night attention (if only to comfort the person who would have to deal with any emergencies that occurred if it went unattended, and who is already traumatised and jumpy from having nursed her dying mother last year).
We waited about three hours to see a doctor, and all the while I'm staring glazy-eyed at the television over the security station, which shows, in this order:
1. Football, in which people wearing short sleeves and short trousers are running around in the rain and bashing into each other at high speeds. Doesn't exactly help my low body temperature or muscle and joint aches.
2. Horrendous 1970's Lee Marvin film with a lot of raw meat and people trying to avoid being killed my combine harvesters driven by homicidal maniacs. Freaks me out and does nothing for my delicate and almost shut-down digestive system.
3. Boxing. See above on football, only more so. When the thought of your sheets touching your skin makes your skin hurt, it's not fun to watch two people beating the crap out of each other for twenty minutes straight.
I finally get to see a doctor around 2:00 a.m., who was very nice and sympathetic (and named Wilson, though he unfortunately did not look like Dr. Wilson on "House") and who said, "yeah, you've either got a really bad case of flu or else it's glandular fever (thanks to him, I found out that that's what they call mono in this country) or it's something else - there's nothing we can do for you now; go home and gargle with salt water and aspirin and alternate paracetemol and ibuprofen, and go see your GP on Monday."
And then we had the hour and a half of "Getting From Paddington To Hackney After The Tube Closes." The flatmate had given me her coat and scarf (her application for sainthood is in the post) and so she was FREEZING, so we walked as fast as we could with my being ill and dizzy and tripped-out on painkillers and her shivering and my trying to wrap myself around her so as to provide the maximum amount of coverage while still being able to walk.
We were almost at the bus stop when a spaced-out blond boy comes up to us and says, "heeey, do you know if there are any nightclubs around here that are still open??"
We just looked at him and said, "NO."
Night buses on weekends are horrible places to be when you're sick. Especially when they go through Piccadilly and you get to see all the fashionable happy people at their trendy parties when you're in sixteen layers of wool and want to go home and die.
We got off the bus at St. Paul's - unfortunately the wrong SIDE of St. Paul's, so we had to circle around the entire cathedral to get to Cheapside where the 242 bus stops, and Catherine decided that this was the time to stop and poetically admire the beauty of the cathedral against the not-quite-black starlit sky. Oh, and my ankle gave out about six times during the walk.
While we were waiting for the 242 bus (once we got to the bus stop, I basically stood behind Catherine and wrapped all available limbs around her in an attempt to make up for her having no coat, which probably caused many passersby to make entirely incorrect assumptions about the status of our relationship) we were passed by two N8 buses, three taxicabs that didn't stop when Catherine hailed them, two N25 buses, and two boys running for the N25 bus who swore violently when they didn't make it in time. We also got to listen to the bells of St. Paul's tolling 3 o'clock. I'm sure that under different circumstances, I would have appreciated that.
I fell into bed around 4:00 having had a hot shower, gargled with salt water, doped up on paracetomol, turned the heat up to maximum, and wrapped myself in about six layers of fleece and goose down.
I woke up at 2:30 p.m., and am currently operating at about 95%. I was actually able to eat food today!!! So since Friday afternoon, I've lost an inch off my waist, slept for 29 hours out of 55, and gone through an entire box of cold and flu medication.
I also wrapped seven Christmas presents, and watched two episodes of The West Wing. I'm skipping my lecture tomorrow, so as to do all the paperwork I was planning to do over the weekend, because I have a tutorial on Tuesday that's the final review of my Block Practice and I need to be prepared.
Here's hoping I don't relapse again.