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Potentially recovering, and what this strange illness has been like for an illness-idolizer.
Sore throat today, less dry stabbing (like yesterday) and more just swollen and recovering. The fever, if it is a fever, was pretty impressive last night: my core was constantly hot; my extremity were shivering. Today I seem to be running a little warm, but it's not accompanied by any chills. I'm a bit achy and sore, but nothing compared to yesterday: like my throat, this feels more like recovery than pain.
So I seem to be on the mend, but then that would make this a 24-hour fever—which seems strange to me. Stranger still,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
century_eyes reports similar symptoms ... and we got back from Portland a week ago, which seems like a pretty long incubation period.
More oddly, this has been almost ... pleasant. I'm not saying that I'd sign up for another round with it if I could, but this has been an idealized bout of illness. The symptoms are real but moderate and they've hardly destroyed my quality of life, the aches have been unpleasant but I know how to deal with them, the fever has made me spacey and talkative (and fascinated by my own physical state), and an illness without coughing or a runny nose feels almost ... beautiful.
I don't know how to describe it, really—this may be one of the things that you get or you don't. I've always idolized the death-bed consumptive, those pale sick waifs, so beautifully frail, so sympathetic; I glorify the down pillows and white gowns of bedrest; I'm the sort to read The Secret Garden and envy Colin: don't mistake me, I want to be wheeled to the garden, but I want a curtain-drawn bed and servants too.
That's not what real sickness is, of course. Sickness is messy and unsympathetic and it's sure as fuck not comfortable no matter how nice your pillows might be; even being papered and pitied and coddled is miserable—miserable to know that you have to be, miserable to know that people think of you as Sick. I know that, and I think it's because I know that, because I know what it's like to be hurting too bad to move, to be viewed with doubt and impatience, to be treated with kid gloves, that I envy the non-existent ideal of an illness that is beautiful, weak and strange and beautiful.
As it turns out that 24 hours of a mild fever aren't far from that ideal, for me.
Just watch, I'll be attacked my mucus imps now and will spend a week blowing my nose in bed while the universe teaches me a lesson or three. But yesterday—as much as being sick is never fun, really, no matter its associations with daytime cartoons—yesterday was oddly wonderful. Wonderful, and a little heartbreaking, and very surreal.
So I seem to be on the mend, but then that would make this a 24-hour fever—which seems strange to me. Stranger still,
century_eyes reports similar symptoms ... and we got back from Portland a week ago, which seems like a pretty long incubation period.More oddly, this has been almost ... pleasant. I'm not saying that I'd sign up for another round with it if I could, but this has been an idealized bout of illness. The symptoms are real but moderate and they've hardly destroyed my quality of life, the aches have been unpleasant but I know how to deal with them, the fever has made me spacey and talkative (and fascinated by my own physical state), and an illness without coughing or a runny nose feels almost ... beautiful.
I don't know how to describe it, really—this may be one of the things that you get or you don't. I've always idolized the death-bed consumptive, those pale sick waifs, so beautifully frail, so sympathetic; I glorify the down pillows and white gowns of bedrest; I'm the sort to read The Secret Garden and envy Colin: don't mistake me, I want to be wheeled to the garden, but I want a curtain-drawn bed and servants too.
That's not what real sickness is, of course. Sickness is messy and unsympathetic and it's sure as fuck not comfortable no matter how nice your pillows might be; even being papered and pitied and coddled is miserable—miserable to know that you have to be, miserable to know that people think of you as Sick. I know that, and I think it's because I know that, because I know what it's like to be hurting too bad to move, to be viewed with doubt and impatience, to be treated with kid gloves, that I envy the non-existent ideal of an illness that is beautiful, weak and strange and beautiful.
As it turns out that 24 hours of a mild fever aren't far from that ideal, for me.
Just watch, I'll be attacked my mucus imps now and will spend a week blowing my nose in bed while the universe teaches me a lesson or three. But yesterday—as much as being sick is never fun, really, no matter its associations with daytime cartoons—yesterday was oddly wonderful. Wonderful, and a little heartbreaking, and very surreal.