tiptoes.

I have a love/hate relationship with the narcissism of blogs. Personal blogs exist to talk about one’s self, obviously, which from others more often that not causes me to roll my eyes. But I stop short because I, myself, participate in such self indulgent acts from time to time.

Like now, for example.

I can’t resist blogging about such a banal and personal act as getting sick because I wasn’t just sick, I was part of the four alarm fire that is H1N1.

About two weeks ago, I got a cough, a sore throat, and generally started feeling nasty, so S and I kicked the raw juice regimen in double-time. We started every morning with emergen-c + a glass of raw beets, red carrots, apples, pears, oranges, and whatever other veggies we had in the fridge. I stopped eating dairy. I slept more.

And voila! I started to feel better. My mama came to town. I ate less consciously. We stayed out at bars until 4am every night (ha! just kidding).

A few days later, mama left and the next morning I woke up feeling like wheat paste. I trudged to my morning lab with intent to go to student health services afterwards, so I called them during my walk between the subway and class to set up an appointment.

This is when the chaos started. As soon as I actually got someone from Health Services on the line (about 2 hours later), she forcefully told me that I need to leave class, not get on the subway and wait to call her back.

For some reason, I actually listened and sat on a fire hydrant on 14th street for close to 40 minutes before calling S to just come pick me up. They called me back to say that my flu-like symptoms were in fact similar to H1N1 so I should go home, take cold/flu medicine and not leave the house until my fever has gone away. Oh, but the medicine would reduce my fever anyway, so I couldn’t tell when it was really gone, so I should leave the house only after all of my symptoms are gone.

Unless of course, I wanted to wear a mask.

Considering all I wanted to do was sleep, I did just that for the next 4 days, waking from my slumber to find no fever and empty cupboards. S & I didn’t have fevers and were feeling marginally better, so we figured we could take a quick trip to the grocery story, no harm done.

Wrong. 6 hours later, we were finally back home. We slept for the next 4 days. Rinse. Repeat. Until a week and a half later we felt well enough to at least do our laundry. This time, we weren’t going to risk it, so we tied bandannas over our faces and headed to Mega Laundromat. We scared small children and old ladies alike, but none of them came near us. Mission accomplished. We weren’t giving anyone this flu.

But then we went back home. To the tiny apartment we’d been stuck in day-in, day-out for weeks. No going out. No seeing friends. Little to no human interaction. No amount of Scrabble or endless online TV or php programming was going to cure how stir crazy we were. We needed out.

As luck should have it, we both miraculously felt better overnight. We both made it to our Tuesday night classes and even went to an early art opening this weekend. To this day, neither one of us feels spectacular, just happy that we can interact with the rest of the world.