Sick again

Confined to bed for at least three days, that's what the doctor said. I hadn't gotten entirely better from the cold I had after the trip to Sicily, and between the weekend in Venice and the various colds everyone at school has been coming down with, my immune system didn't stand a chance. I started to feel a tad under the weather Monday afternoon (in the Ancient History test I'd forgotten about till that morning), but still had theatre class to go to that afternoon. It started to rain, and by the time theatre was let out, it was pouring. I stood in the rain waiting to be picked up, huddling in the meager shelter of a newstand, for about 20 minutes before Armida finally came. It was at this point that I got my fever. I didn't measure it till this morning, a day and a half later, when it had gone down considerably, but it was 101 degrees F.

Despite feeling pretty crappy, I went to school on Tuesday. I had two extremely dorky reasons: my extra Greek class, and the National Latin Exam. Stupid, stupid, stupid! As soon as I got home, I crawled pitifully into bed, woke up for half an hour to eat a bowl of steaming hot broth, which helped my throat a little, and then fell back into my feverish uneven sleep. I have gotten out of bed a grand total of one time today, to go to the bathroom. I'm sitting, bundled in layers and layers of clothes and blankets, alternately hot and cold, surrounded by piles of soggy gross kleenex (who knew the human body even contained that much snot?), some self-prescribed chocolate (cure for everything, you know), books, my computer... The only things missing are schoolbooks. Armida has been bringing me meals in bed, which is a tremendous luxury; lunch today was, get this, apples boiled in wine. I guess when you're sick you get the full treatment, eh? It was delicious. I kind of want more. And it was easy on my throat, which is so painful that it actually hurts to move my head back and forth. This sucks. Though I guess I really can't complain: I brought it on myself for going to school yesterday.

But it sucks being sick! It's miserable and snotty and I haven't been able to enjoy any food for two days for the knowledge that no matter how delicious it is, I'm going to have to swallow it, and my lips are chapped and bleeding because I can't breathe through my nose, and my nose is chapped and raw because I'm blowing it so often. I sleep feverishly, which means that I toss and turn all night and have annoyingly excessive dreams, usually related in some way or another to whichever book I'm reading (last time I was sick, I was reading The Time Traveler's Wife, which had me so confused in my dreams... never read a book with a screwed up timeline if you're feverish). I've just finished High Fidelity and started the extremely pompous book Empires of the Word; A Language History of the World because I'm interested in linguistics and my unhelpful, dotty college counselor lent it to me since she'd just finished it and appraised it highly. So, I'll beat my way through it. But anyway, my febrile condition managed to keep me tossing and turning and continually awakening wondering if Rob was really going to learn an extra language just to try and meet that girl in the bar, and how the author of the language book, prissy Oxford graduate Nicholas Ostler, had learned so many languages if all he wanted was to win back his old girlfriend. And every so often I would find myself harking back to my read of last week, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and trying to figure out how they managed to capture Quasimodo, if Esmeralda had come back to life... it makes so little sense! There's lack of coherence in my life when I'm not sick, so can we talk about how completely fried I am this week? Sleeping is every bit as exhausting as being awake, except maybe more so, because when I'm awake I'm definitely calmer. Not to mention there's something about being upright that clears the nose. I wake up easily every 45 minutes all night long to blow my nose, which is bright red and flaky at the moment.

Aaaah, I'm so gross! And I've given up on the pompous Oxford guy book, for the moment at least, in favor of Angela's Ashes. I'm going to be here in bed for at least tomorrow, probably Friday too, which means that I don't even have to worry about school for 4 more days, which means I can catch up on all the reading I wanted to do. Maybe I'll finally finish a book or two in Italian... I still haven't finished Charlie, though that's not a statement to my slowness in reading in Italian; it's a statement to me NOT reading in Italian. Well, wish me hot soup and broth and good things, and hope I haven't got bird flu again. 'Twoud be most unfair to get bird flu twice in two weeks.