I just got over a bout of the flu. This pretty much makes me an expert on the subject so I thought I’d share some of what I learned the past week, things the CDC won’t tell you because it’s just too unpleasant and might upset small children and some family pets.
The first thing I learned is that you shouldn’t presume that “cold” you just contracted is actually a cold and you shouldn’t just suck it up and go to your rehearsal that night for your play. Because then you realize later in the evening that you probably now have a fever, which is weird because the last time you had a fever from the flu was about 15 years ago, and you’ve pretty much forgotten what that felt like. Not to worry. The flu virus will remind you. It will remind you AFTER you infect at least two of your cast/crew mates.
By the next day, my body had ceased all useful functioning. I was coughing, sneezing, cold, achy, wheezy, breezy and a joy to look at. I sneezed so hard at one point that my tiara almost flew off.
The next thing I learned is that Dr. Google has a shorter wait time than the local clinic and that based on my symptoms, I must either have the flu or something even worse that I couldn’t pronounce. Since the flu is easier to say and spell and I was, quite frankly, exhausted and simply out of patience with this whole disease diagnosis thing, I opted for the flu.
I also learned that you shouldn’t make major life decisions when you have a fever. Overheated brain cells do weird things to your thought process, it seems. It all started with a little panic attack I had over having to cancel clients this week. I’m self employed and just barely make it through each month, so having clients cancel, or having to cancel them myself, causes huge concern. This flu really brought home how tenuous a situation self-employment can be as I tried to use my phone’s calculator to figure out how much money I was losing and when exactly I was going to starve to death. Turns out it’s a week from Tuesday.
Then I got a brilliant, fever-induced idea. I would become a dredger.
I am house/pet sitting this week for friends and they live on a river. I could see that river through the sliding glass door from where I lay dying on the loveseat in their kitchen. That’s as far as I made it that morning. Luckily I had a great view of the dredging machine that was working on their river, removing all the gross stuff off the bottom to make it more passable for the neighbourhood boats.
I was mesmerized.
Here was this guy, sitting in what I decided is likely a heated cab of a dredging machine which sits on a floaty barge thingy, and he’s pulling himself through the ice, breaking it with his scooper-upper contraption and depositing the ice on either side of the river.
The other guy doing the actual dredging is just a few houses upriver from this but I couldn’t stand up to take a photo. You’ll have to imagine how cool that looked.
My fever brain decided that this should be my next career move and that I should start researching how to make this happen as soon as I got over this flu.
The last thing I learned while having the flu is that you shouldn’t watch shows about disease outbreaks. I watched one episode of Helix on Netflix and decided that Dr. Google was likely wrong and that whatever I did have was going to turn me into a virulent zombie.
Fortunately for me and the rest of mankind, my fever broke during the night and by the following morning I had beaten the odds and was no longer in danger of infecting the world with an incurable disease. I was also not going to become a dredger.
These are flu survival tips you are unlikely to hear from your doctor or the CDC. So if you do get sick, drink plenty of fluids, get lots of rest, and stay away from other people, sliding glass doors and zombie shows.