Hurray, not dead! And some thanks!

While I still feel like there's a steel rod, barbed with little razors, in my throat, it is, at least, no longer rotating, and pounding in and out at piston-speed. Was able to swallow solid food this morning, and I actually got almost a full 8 hours of sleep last night, so I think I am "better".

What a fucked up virus that was. "Yeah, can't do anything for you," said the doctor, "we're no good with viruses yet -- antibioticis will do nothing, and while you're inflamed, it isn't tonsilitis or Strep, so all I can do is give you a perscription for vicodin and ice cream."

The vicodin didn't do much but allow me to sleep for a whole hour at a time, rather than just 20 minutes -- and by day #2 it started to WIRE me, and give me really nasty hallucinations of the angel of death floating around the roof of my bedroom.

Tzipora suffered more from cabin fever than anything else -- she had bad naseua (nothing worse than having to puke, and puking up nothing but water, right?), and a severe case of the spins -- but the fact that she couldn't escape the house in nearly a week was worse for her than almost anything else. The lady is a free spirit.

And Ben smiled through the whole thing, with nary a symptom in sight -- other than being really really sad that we kept handing him off to grandparents to take him to the park. "Where sickness from?" he'd keep asking, as if, fireman-style, he'd go kicking down some door to battle it and get his parents back. Heart-breaking, really. I love the little guy so much, but am glad he had existential pain, rather than real pain.

I'm taking one more day to get back up to speed, but I think by tomorrow I'll be down to "dull roar of pain", and I can go catch up on nearly a damn week's worth of paperwork and stuff at the store.

SO: big BIG thanks to the staff for keeping shit together while I suffered sleep-and-food deprivation -- and even more so from the absolute last-minute warning I heaped it on to them.

Especially double-plus thanks go to Jeff Lester for fighting an unfamiliar photocopier and getting ONOMATOPOEIA run off. He called me 3-4 times on Firday, each with a "Uh, WTF is this machine doing?!" question, and each time he sounded more and more defeated by the mechanical beast -- escpecially since I couldn't answer ANY of his questions (I've never USED the "duplex to simplex" feature, sorry!). But he perservered, and got shit taken care of, and he should be lauded -- LAUDED -- by the Gods themselves.

Anyway, now that I CAN sleep, I'm going to go and try and fit in another 12-16 hours today.

Mm, yeah, The newest Tilting also made it up at:

http://www.newsarama.com/Tilting2_0/Tilting27.html

go give it a read, I guess, though it was written in a vicodin haze and contains AT LEAST one absolutely, verifiably, 100% false statement. Can YOU spot it? Because I have NO idea how I could have written it (except for the whole "vicodin-haze" thing) -- me, of ALL people should have known better....

-B