Flu: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

It started Tuesday night... I woke up at 11pm with a feeling of indigestion which soon turned into vomiting, trips to the toilet, and full-on chills. Two hot showers and one hot bath later, I managed to doze into a delirium-based sleep in which I awoke several times with nightmarish dreams that intertwined the sci-fi book I'm reading, Dan Simmons' "Hyperion", with real life events, and I was unable to discern if they were real or not.

A blessing came when I got a text from my school announcing it was a snow day. I was so delirious at that stage I'm not sure if I would have had the presence of mind to call in sick that morning. I remember my cat walking into my bedroom at that moment and I thought it was a black lab.

Fortunately, since it was a snow day, Kate was off also. She was a complete angel, looking over me the entire day and tending to whatever I needed. As late afternoon turned into evening, it became obvious that work the next day was not a good idea. Kate deciphered my grunts as I dictated a lesson plan for the sub and emailed it off. However, it was beginning to feel like the worst was over.

Last night I slept very soundly. The fever had broken and I don't recall waking up at all during the night. My body still aches a bit and I still feel weak, but I should be able to return to work tomorrow and hopefully feel up for a short test run on Saturday.

The bright side is the timing of this. Better now than closer to the Boston Marathon, and though it's possible to get really sick again, the law of averages swings the odds greatly in my favor of avoiding another bout of viral hell. Plenty of time to rebound from this, and I'll have only missed less than a week of training. So yeah, unfortunate but things could have been worse.