Starve a Fever

Hello everyone.  This post might be a dissapointment because I don't really feel like writing it because I feel like crap!  On Friday evening I started feeling a strange tickle in my chest and had a light cough.  On Friday night I was laying on the couch and realized I was really cold and was shivering!  Then I peeled myself off the couch and felt the spinning head that could only mean one thing...I had the flu!  YIKES!  My worries were confirmed as I shivered under layers of quilts as I tried to fall asleep only to wake up at 5 am dripping with sweat.   Like most people, I usually get, I would say, two colds each year.  I don't often get sick otherwise so when I do I loathe every minute.  What makes it worse is that I don't handle feverish spells very well. 

For example, I sleep fitfully and have strange dreams when I am sick.  So, when sleep is most necessary, I usually don't sleep enough.  This situation has improved with age but when I was a child my feverish dreams were disturbing and very realistic.  I won't even repeat how weird they were because you might question my sanity.  I recall one night when I was sick and I had a terrifying dream that still seemed real after I woke up.  I got up to alert my parents of the situation (that was just a remnant of the dream) and finally came back to reality as I stood at the base of the stairway and found myself surrounded by our backpacks tossed in the corner and the damp mittens and boots drying on the radiator and thought "Wow, I am not waking them up.  It was all a dream. They will think I am really crazy!" and then I went back upstairs to my room.  Another night, during my first year of law school, I was sick and delerious the week after our family ski trip.  My brother had contracted bronchitis on the trip and I inevitably had it a few days later.  I woke up in the middle of the night, all sweaty and feverish, and went into my closet and changed into one of the shirts hanging up in there.  A shirt that I would wear out in public, not sleep in!  In the morning I didn't remember why I did it.  If my future children react to illness the way I did I'm sure I am in for a treat.  Hopefully they will just lay around and complain and not go staggering around the house in the middle of the night in some other dimension of reality and have late night wardrobe changes!

Does anyone remember the chapter in the book "Little House on the Prairie" called "Fever n' Ague" where the Ingalls family gets Malaria and they are so sick and dehydrated that they can't get out of bed and Laura, although just as sick as everyone else, is so worried about everyone that she gets up and goes stumbling across the cabin to get water for her family?  I remember thinking that I knew exactly how she felt.  Of course, I don't mean the part about having Malaria on the prairie with no way to call for help.  I just remember relating to the feeling of not wanting to get up when feeling really crappy and feeling your head spin when you finally do.  I love those books.  They are still so vivid to me!  Random things remind me of chapters from the series often. 

So, anyway, that was probably really boring.  I'll do better when I feel better and my lungs don't hurt from coughing and my temp goes back below 99 degrees!  I have tried to cajole Justin into posting on here occasionally but it's not really his thing.  So I try to related information about him as well when we don't do things together...this weekend he and his cousin processed the previously mentioned meat and he said he has 65 packages of breakfast sausuages or something like that.  It's a good thing we have a huge freezer.