Whew... Being sick is something I don't think any of us enjoy. (Perhaps we get some simple pleasure from the fact that we can't go to work, but that is quickly overcome by whatever pain we are experiencing.) I just went through what felt like an eternal bender.
Last fall, J & J and Steffi and I took a trip to Chicago for some shopping and fun. J & I ended up going out that night to the Signature Lounge (at the Signature Room at the 95th) to enjoy a few cocktails and the night storm that came in (I wish I had a real camera to take pictures of some of the show that the sky gave us). What started as a few cocktails turned into a few too many. Most of my drinking days have been had in towns where cocktails are ridiculously watered down, so I had no idea what was coming at me when I ordered my favorite: double gin tonic (I think it was Tanqueray No. 10 that evening). Well, after too many drinks and far too many laughs, J and I closed the lounge and finally headed back towards the hotel. J's natural instinct when he's been drinking too much is to order fast food at some typical we're-open-24-hrs-a-day-to-stuff-your-arteries restaurant. McDonalds it was. After giggling uncontrollably while the server looked at us like we had just walked in off the moon (we were obviously country folk in a big city, at a food joint normally reserved for street walkers of a different kind), I finally composed myself and ordered a large chocolate shake and a double cheeseburger. Just what the doctor ordered - milk and grease to go with that gin. mmmmmmm.... yum. After drinking 1/50th of the 2 gallon shake and eating part of the cheeseburger, we were on our way. I tried to give a homeless guy a few bucks and ended up almost handing him $50. He gave me a hug for the fiver I gave him anyway. I shoulda' given him $50. It's amazing how bad I feel about that to this day. I don't care what he would have done with it. J and I had just blown close to $150 on drinks and I was going to worry about what a guy from the streets of Chicago was going to do with $50? There was a 50/50 chance that he would have done something good with it - and that is better than what I can say of what we did with triple that.
Anyway, I think it was the cheeseburger that put me over the edge. The next day, I felt like someone had poured acid into my stomach and was waiting for it to dissolve through my abdomen and flow down the front of me. I don't get headaches from hangovers, per se. When I get sick it has to do with this eerie feeling that the world is sliding away from under me. My sense of smell is heightened to extremes where the faintest odor of perfume or air fresheners drives me nuts and makes me want to vomit. And yes, there is the slimy, slippery feeling of nausea. I suddenly get the urge to eat things I know are going to make me sicker, yet any time I try to eat something good for me (like crackers), I get sick.
Well, the last five days have been exactly like that, except I had nothing to drink to induce it. On top of the normal sense of nausea, I had a splitting headache that made me want to hide in a corner and disappear. The weirdest part of having been sick this time around, though, was the cravings that I got. Somewhere along the line - when I wasn't even able to keep down crackers and water - I got a craving for chicken fried rice. What the hell is that? My mind thought that the same body that was rejecting water wouldn't mind a dose of msg, bad chicken and oily, fried rice. I've got a great mind-body meld working here.
Now that I'm slowly coming out o the sickness funk, I'm finding that my old friend, dizziness, is returning for a spin. I've written before how I suffer from these ridiculous bouts of vertigo for weeks or months at a time, and this isn't one of those times where I'd like to talk about it. I'd like to ignore it, but it's hard with the world swimming about me. I was hoping that the flu would knock the dizziness right out of my head and for a while, I thought it did. I was wrong, it was just the needling headache gnawing at my brain.
Oh well, swimming is better than sleeping.
