odd week

After ten days of not feeling well, I finally recovered enough to say I was over the recent nasty sickness. Even though I was at work for the first couple of days this week, it seemed like everything I touched went wrong. Maybe it was the sickness looming over me and maybe my mind was not clear enough for intensive work conditions. Whatever it was, I was not very encouraged by my slow progress on my tasks at hand. Just about when I was ready to give up all hope, I finally found a way to fix the bugs I was slaving away on all week. It has happened to me several times in my long career in software development.

In addition several other things happened yesterday of note. At lunch a friend of mine, who is a mechanic, showed up at our house to fix my car, which had a check engine light on for the last several weeks. The Nissan dealer told him it would be six hours minimum as the manifold would have to be removed in a long timely process. Being the experienced mechanic he knew to try other things first. He found and fixed the problem without the labor intensive procedures the dealer had suggested. The best thing of all was that the charge was half of what he originally estimated, which had to be at least half of what the dealer would have charged me.

Then when our kids got home from school, I was appointed to take my son to get his drivers license. Seeing that he had hardly driven, the end result was predictable as he failed the driving test. The people at the license office were not very friendly and were definitely intimidating, which definitely did not help matters at all. There crabiness never prevented a single accident or drunk driving teenager death and yet for some reason they spread their unhappiness to all who entered attempting to get a new license.

To top off the day, our son was to arrive from California, but his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC. He missed all of the flights for the evening and at the minute we are still waiting to see if he makes it on the next flight as a stand-by passenger. A typical end to a most unusual week.

resident evil

As my boys play the new Resident Evil #7 game, I have been laying around battling the evil bugs that have taken up residence in my body. Soon after reaching work on Monday I started feeling bad with my throat hurting and my head throbbing. I went to the company health clinic, but they did not help much. On Monday night my throat felt like I drank gasoline and threw a light match in my mouth. I did not get much sleep that night. The next day my head felt like someone was hitting it with hammers. My chest felt like a NFL lineman was sitting on my chest. In the afternoon I could not take it any more and went to our local family doctor. She had mercy on me and gave me antibiotics. By the time it turned dust my throat was on fire again. I tried gargling salt water, cough drops, some magic mouthwash stuff and nothing really helped. On Wednesday night I started cough uncontrollably. I moved into our guest room so my wife could actually get some sleep even though I had little hope of getting any myself. As the night progressed my whole body started hurting. My neck, my back and then my kidneys. When I got up in the morning I could only hope the medicine would start working so I could feel better. Finally after a morning nap I started to feel slightly better. Who knows when the evil residents will decide to leave, but I can hope that occurs sometime tonight.

The sickness

Sometimes it just does not pay to get out of bed. As our beach vacation ended, everyone started getting sick. Our daughter got sick right before our vacation started and slowly it spread to the whole family. Every one but the two left handers in the family. This certainly is an odd illness that only affects right handed people! What is even more strange is that the disease affects every one differently. My wife got tonsillitis, which I thought only young kids got. In fact for her she got it quite often as a child and had not had it since. Also both my wife and daughter got really bad sores all over their tongues. My middle son who was the first to get it from my daughter never had a sore throat but had a cough and felt really run down. Our oldest son had the symptoms the longest and after the initial sore throat had a cough that lasted two weeks. For me I had a sore throat for over a week and then cough and then a sinus infection and now may have bronchitis. Recently any time I get a viral or bacteria infection it always spreads to my sinuses. Now can one illness spread by my daughter have so many different manifestations? I think someone has come up with a biologic weapon than finds the weakness in the person affected and takes advantage of it. The only problem with this theory is we are not important as a family for someone to try it out on us. The sickness mystery will have to remain unsolved - I just hope we get well soon.