Lyrics: “Patience” – Take That, 2006
I’ve been felled by a nasty stomach bug on Monday. I’ll spare you the details. The actual stomach bug (feeling and being sick) didn’t even seem to be the biggest issue, but the fever that set in on Monday evening. 38.9 °C around 6 PM. Here is a screenshot – cobbled together – of Monday/Tuesday from my Smartwatch app. My heartrate was consistently around 90 for most of the night. I didn’t sleep a wink.
Yesterday (Tuesday) my GP signed me off work for the rest of the week. I stayed in bed most of the time yesterday as well, still had a bit of a temperature for most of the day. But after “no food Monday” I again tried to eat something. Zwieback. Grated Apple. Broth with tiny noodles (the supermarket didn’t have the alphabet ones though). Pasta in the evening. I was able to keep it all down, which to be honest I expected to as I never really felt nauseous since that one first moment Monday morning. No idea what what kind of bug that was and where I got it. For a moment I considered food poisoning, but I think for that it shouldn’t have started in the morning, 8-9 hours after my last meal. I’ll never know. And yes, of course I also took COVID tests: Negative; so far anyway.
Today (Wednesday) is the first day I got up properly. Showered, dressed (in more than a sleepshirt) and all that jazz. I’m still taking it easy, because I do still feel a bit wobbly and slightly headach-y, which I guess might be an aftereffect of that bout of fever.
These past two days have been an exercise in acquiescence and patience and I was surprised how well I handled that. Especially yesterday I had moments where I thought I could / should at least read something or listen to a podcast and thus not “waste” my time lying in bed. I did neither though, because I couldn’t be bothered to listen to anything more than my favourite go-to-sleep-audiobook series. I only occasionally thought of work and hardly ever felt guilty for “making” my coworkers pick up my slack this week. I spent a few moment pondering why my first impulse often was / is to feel bad about being off work sick. It might have something to do with a mixture of the 2nd and 3rd item of this list:
There are other parts of my life where I apply that mind-set much more than I should and I pondered that for a bit as well.
You can do a lot of pondering when you keep lying in bed, trying to catch some rest. I tried to put some of those and other thoughts down on paper this morning as well. It sometimes does help and I should make more of a habit out of that. Maybe.
