A Plague Upon My House

I am pretty sure I was a victim of some sort of biological warfare this weekend. Whatever hit me Thursday night struck without warning, and left me writhing and moaning on my bathmat most of the night. At one point I remember fantasizing that someone would come knock me unconscious and put me out of my misery.

I am not really a "sickie" person. The last time I got the flu was when I was an intern doing my pediatric rotation at the children's hospital in January. We would average over 20 admissions a night, most of them dehydrated kiddos, and it was only a matter of time before we were all wandering around, feverish, nauseated and light-headed, clutching our cups of 7-up. But I haven't worked in a medical facility in two years, and I am still a compulsive hand-washer, so I have no idea how this germ breached our household defenses.

Around 2am, when my body had not yet caught onto the fact that there was, in fact, nothing left to vomit and was valiantly trying to evacuate my guts instead, I swallowed my pride and paged the resident on call. This resident probably carries the same pager that I carried as a senior, and it really just felt so wrong to know that if she was lucky enough to be getting a little sleep, that I was going to be the cause of the shrill beeping that would jerk her awake again. But that empathy did not hurt nearly as much as the alien force that had set up camp in my stomach, and so I had her call in some Phenergan to the closest 24-hour pharmacy.

I woke up my husband, who somehow managed to sleep through this whole hideous drama, and he went and got the prescription for me. Five minutes after I swallowed the first pill, he asked, "Is it working yet?" and then started to snore. Through some kind of divine intervention, he also somehow managed to avoid catching this crud. This is another reason why I suspect a targeted attack.

Today was the first day that I was able to move around my house without feeling like I'd been run over by a tank. I really think that the army should just culture me and then shoot this germ into the caves of Afghanistan. I'm pretty sure we'd find Osama bin Laden writhing around and begging to be captured in exchange for anti-emetic medication.