Getting Down with the Sickness

Despite the fact I am not a big fan of Star Wars I appreciate the idea that the wise and distinguished Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi has described the Force as an energy field that both binds us and surrounds us, in essence making it the underpinning of our universe. That being the case it was sometime last Sunday afternoon when I began to feel the first hints of a disturbance in the Force that binds me. Not that I let that bother me, since I work third-shift with my week beginning Sunday nights my bodily rhythms are always as screwed up as a conservative Republican's view of reality.

So like I have for more years than I really want to think about I went through the usual motions for the rest of that day and drove off to work at my usual time that night. From there it promptly went straight downhill with the slight tremors in the Force increasing to the point they would have registered about a nine on the Richter Scale that measures earthquakes. Going from feeling just “bad” to alternating between chills one moment then to intense bodily, flop sweats in the space of minutes was bad enough, but having to drive home in Monday morning rush hour traffic made things even more interesting to the point the journey took on certain suicidal aspects.

I'm not saying people here in this part of South Carolina are any worse drivers than in other cities but there were certain hallucinatory incidents that made the trip home especially difficult. Some of these apparitions were easy to distinguish from reality. I know I didn't really pass by the previously mentioned Obi-Wan and Captain James T. Kirk having an awesome beach party on the side of the road with the green-skinned Orion Slave girl volleyball team while roasting the body of Jar-Jar Binks over an open fire. However, I'm still a little worried over the image I saw of Mitt Romney as a Borg drone, Fat Boy Christie dressed up as Baron Harkonnen from the Dune books and movies, and Michele Bachman as her normal self.       

After I arrived home though that is when the all encompassing body aches joined forces with the chills and sweats tag team. Last Monday was MLK day here in South Carolina and because of that the wife and kids stayed home all day. Not that  let that bother me, it was all I could do to close the bedroom door, strip down to my Spider-man adult-sized underoos, then fall down on the bed hoping I didn't miss the damn thing.

While my wife would later roll her eyes in dismay and give the usual speech about how I should try and pass a football-sized infant through an opening the width of a pea that entire day was spent in a world of bewildering pain that I thought several times, during belief semi-lucid moments, it would tear me apart down to a genetic level. It was during those short moments of functioning consciousness that several rather profound thoughts crossed my mind.

Since I had long since come to the conclusion that I was suffering from the flu my first thought was that, like for the last seven years, I had received the shot for it why had it hit me like a semi going two-hundred miles an hour. The next occurred after a short dream involving ravaging hordes of the undead feasting on brains where I found myself believing that my condition might be an improvement if all this was me suffering from a zombie bite. The final thought was the question of why hadn't my loving family brought me a warm bowl of chicken soup. I made several pitiful distress calls while lying on the bed but when no one answered I decided I would have do the extreme and make my own soup.

Believe it or not I either walked through an unexpected dimensional portal that made the walk from the bedroom to the kitchen an epic journey across an unknown continent on another planet or I simply got lost and walked around in a daze. I honestly don't know which would be worst but I was eventually found by my wife who swears I was making sexual advances on the Dyson vacuum cleaner. 

Except for the onset of certain messy stomach related issues I will not cover that pretty much sums up the rest of my week with me recovered enough to go back into work Thursday night. A little helpful rule of thumb for anyone who later finds themselves working third-shift but missed most of the week due to the flu. I was so mentally and physically out of the loop on what was going I would have been a danger to anyone around me had I not picked a task that confined me to a very isolated part of the building.
         
Hopefully this illness will completely pass in a few days, I still have the occasional hallucinations but unfortunately they don't involve the scantily clad Orion Slave Girl volleyball team. My visions now involve the Dyson vacuum cleaner dressed  like Michele Bachmann whispering to me that the refrigerator is secretly a communist.



Here's the theme song to Frasier, thank god for Netflix this past week.