For the last few months I've been traveling around the middle east/southwest Asia working as a floater. When someone goes home on leave, or for training, I fly in and cover for a while. My immune system has NOT been keeping pace. Two out of the last four places I've been, I've nearly immediately gotten sick as dog shit, but not been able to take sick days, or extra rest. I've had to power through fevers, headaches, snot dripping, and diarrhea squirting. Focus: What's the most inconvenient timing you've ever had with an illness? What's the sickest you've ever been?
After I graduated college I drove 8 hours to the Preakness with 6 guys in the car. It was a complete shitshow of a few days. Lots of drinking, random hookups with strangers, and little sleep. I had Mono the entire time. I felt like shit and kept falling asleep and didn't know why but I powered through. After I drove home, I admitted myself to the ER and had to be put on oxygen. Bump.
The moment I got back from Spain, I got a terrible flu. I literally was fucking my welcome home fuck buddy and I felt the shivers kick in. I gave her the Spanish flu (haha) and she never talked to me again. I got dengue on a trip to Copan, so I saw a bunch of Mayan ruins and vomited all over them. For four of the most miserable days a human being can survive. In fact, the entire time I lived in Honduras, sex with The Girlfriend was negotiated around which of us had rashes, diarrhea, or other bodily distress at the time. At one point, we had to stop having sex because I literally developed a respiratory infection and had to go to the hospital. I had a pilonidal cyst (an uber-infected hair follicle in the cleft of one's ass, also known as Jeep disease) after a few weeks of living in a Balinese hotel room with my girlfriend. The cyst was infected, then turned slightly necrotic (oozing black, foul-smelling goo) during a Balinese holiday, so by the time it was looked at, it was bad. I had to endure surprisingly excruciating pain getting it sliced open and drained. The smell was so bad the nurse fled the room like Godzilla was attacking the city. My girlfriend saw her leaving, pale faced and hand over her mouth and realized how bad it had gotten. I then had to lie on my stomach for two days while the cyst drained pus, black goo and blood. In a hotel room I shared with my girlfriend the size of a frugal suitcase. This woman deserves a medal for enduring the smell alone, never mind the sight of me wiping that god-awful mess up every ten or twenty minutes.
Timely. (well not now since downndirty's one upsmanship) Last month right before I left for a week for my brother's wedding. I had a lingering sinus infection that turned into bronchitis. The worst hit the day before I had to leave and I badly could move off of the couch. Just fucking phlegm and coughing and misery. I went to the doctors that day and they switched my antibiotics and gave me an inhaler. My sinuses were fucked and the plane ride just made it ten times worse. We somehow missed the tram that took you from terminal to terminal at our connection and we went out and caught a bus and then had to go back through security again. A TSA agent was giving me shit for sitting down in a non moving fucking line. Trudging through the airport with luggage with my back starting to kill me, I really wanted to die. Then landing at our destination my fucking ears popped insanely hard and painfully, it felt like someone rammed needles through my ear drums. The ringing and hearing loss Id say was at 60%. We got to our beach house late and I passed out. My mom surfing WebMD was convinced I was going to be permanently deaf took me to urgent care in the morning. They gave me steroids and a new antibiotic. By the next day my symptoms had mostly gone away. I don't know if it was the steroids or the bronchitis but I was zapped and was sluggish and tired the rest of the trip. I had spent weeks wanting to go shark fishing and planned to get everything I needed when I got there. What should have taken me one afternoon took three buying and setting up my rigs since I had to fucking nap every three hours. I eventually got one day in and didn't get a single fucking bite.
I guess I'm lucky, I can't remember the last time I got sick at an inopportune time. I was sick a whole bunch as a kid, so as an adult, I usually can count on being sick once a year. Since I've been super busy over the last several years, I rarely get a 'day off.' By 'day off' I mean I have nothing to do that day. Those days come up once every three months or so, unless I'm on vacation. If I'm going to get sick, it is almost always the evening before a day off, and my guess is that my stress recedes and whatever bug is hanging around, and mentally I'm free from worry, takes hold at that moment, then I'm sick for a couple of days. Then again, I don't do anything super important anymore, so if I'm sick, I'm sick, I deal with it. It usually doesn't affect my work or anyone else.
One Thanksgiving my new husband and I drove down to Atlanta to visit his folks. In addition to the Thanksgiving yummies I had planned out various food places I wanted to hit while we were down there. We hit them all except that it was a huge waste for me. I had a cold that turned into a sinus infection (my first one ever) that affected my taste buds. I had an appetite, but couldn't enjoy the food. So depressing.
I got dysentery along with 4 or 5 other Marines in Afghanistan a few years back. The smell in our makeshift quarantine tent in the middle of the Afghan summer is the stuff nightmares are made of. I also shit myself multiple times during that period which was nice.
Back in November of 2009 I got the sniffles, the kind that never went away - and I really HATE going to the doctor. Trudging through December, it felt like a mild cold, nothing to worry about. In January - January 9 of 2010, to be exact, I woke up and the fan was blowing my arm hairs and it was excruciating pain. I started screaming. That hurt. Eventually I curled into a tiny ball on the couch I had been using as a bed, and cried. For hours I just...couldn't...move it hurt so bad. Finally, I HAD to go to work. My entire body ached. I had a couple of hydrocodone I'd been given for migraines, so I took them and somehow got myself to work. This went on for three days...by the 3d day, The Guy (now The Husband) demands I go to the doctor because my face was sunken and my skin was grayish, I was so pale. Go to doctor, spend 6 HOURS between waiting and actually being seen. My 'little cold' had turned into the flu, pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, and a pulled sub scapular muscle from coughing. My doc was hellbent on admitting me so I'd rest, but my dumb ass refused. Just to tell you how dumb I am - this was the second time this progression had happened, and both times it was in the same order. Two weeks later I had to get my L1 cert, and they wanted me to work out. It was the first weekend after my diagnosis I could actually stand. I'm really thankful this was before HQ decided that in order to be awarded the L1, you had to participate in all 6 workouts for the weekend. I maybe would have died.
Back in high school I got some sort of high powered influenza that knocked me out for about two months. It might've been west nile, might've been the Spanish flu. Not sure which strain it was but that shit is serious, I had a new appreciation for how serious the flu was after that. I was out of high school for a solid month because I was simply so weak I couldn't really get up. I also had some serious nausea. I remember going to a Michigan hockey game with my dad and brother and puking on the way into the game, sitting freezing my ass off in the game despite the fact I was under a heat lamp and puking on the way out. But thats nothing compared to my brother. In grad school he had a brain tumor that knocked him out of the program, pretty bad timing.
Around 2005 I managed to pick up some form of whooping couch and because I didn't want to stay in the base hospital I got some drugs from medical and went back to work. Cough changed and queue me being properly fucked for near on two months. Pretty sure I damaged my lungs because my cardio has never gotten back to the levels it was at even though I'm fitter now than I was then.
Sickest I've ever been was definitely my brain tumor. The tumor itself sucked, almost killed me, the whole she-bang. Then on top of the normal brain surgery recovery (re-learning how to walk, write, do math etc.), I was also extremely hydro-cephalic (fluid in the brain), and also had fluid in my lungs which turned into pneumonia. So the essence of my existence was this: Every few minute's I'd have a major coughing fit from the pneumonia, which would cause the fluid in my brain from being hydro-cephalic to go crazy, which would cause my recently-operated-upon brain to go haywire, which would cause me so much pain I'd crumple to the ground and usually throw up from the intense pain.... You know, standard stuff. Also, this went on for about a month and a half (until I finally found a pulmonologist who paid attention during med school, and ironically was a brain tumor survivor as well). Worst timing probably has to be right now actually. My son was born about two weeks ago and since we got home from the hospital I've been shitting my brains out every 45 minutes - 1 hr, and I mean violent, liquid shit, the kind you get when your doctor makes you take something to cleanse your asshole before a colonoscopy. It took me over two weeks to go to the doctor because I had been so focused on my son that I really didn't have too much time (or concern) for myself. And the way I figured, I was always at home anyway so I was never more than a quick sprint away from the restroom. Well yesterday we had to take him to the NICU for a few days -- he's a bit of a pre-me, so the jaundice and lower body weight kinda comes along with it; our pediatrician figured better safe than sorry -- and I finally got a break to go see someone. Turns out I have one of those crazy hospital parasites you hear about in horror stories that got me a lecture from the dr about not coming in sooner. Something about hospital toilets being hotbeds for that kinda super-bug or something. Yeah, whatever. I'd do it again tomorrow. Those toilets were a godsend to this first-time dad watching his wife go through a 19-hour labor.
While it wasn't exactly the sickest I've ever been, the most nerve-wracking sickness was when I was in Costa Rica. I was totally knocked on my ass for three days and it was the segment of my summer where I was living in a tent and the bathroom facilities were ... sub-optimal for being sick. I was in a small jungle-y town on the Caribbean side so it was hot and humid as all hell, which made having a fever in a tent and being too weak to move even more fun. I pretty much solely subsisted on coconuts for those few days. I never saw anyone about it so the nerve-wracking part was just not knowing what it was. I wasn't sure if it was getting some kind of flu or if I was just fucking exhausted, or if it was something worse. I thought maybe I'd picked up something from the water or the food or a mosquito or something, or I had been attacked by a dog two weeks earlier and had some gnarly booboos on my legs so I thought maybe those were infected. Whenever I tell this story I realize I should've tried to figure out what happened at the time, but, meh. I'm okay. This was also my most inconvenient illness because I learned halfway through that the guy I had had my little Costa Rican affair with was coming back through town for a day and he wanted to see me. He was there on the third day, so I was just beginning to be functional again. My plan was to drag myself to the store to get some solid food and then shower (from a hose taped to the ceiling, but a shower nonetheless) to try and resemble a real live human person again by the time I met up with him. But I didn't make it too far down the road by the time I needed to sit and regain some strength to make it for the next of the walk, and as I was sitting there of course who happens to walk past but the guy. He wanted me to come to dinner with him and some friends and, since I was trying to preserve his memories of our romantic exotic fling together, I reaaalllyyy realllyyy did not want to put thoughts into his head of me rolling around in a puddle of my own sweat and huddling in the bathroom for three days. So I just pretended everything was fine and accompanied him to dinner as a mere husk of myself, talking like I was still delirious and probably reeking. SOMEHOW this came off as being nervous and shy, which he thought was sweet, because I am a fucking champ.
An odd side effect to deployments...you'll get the local crude going around for sure, but you tend to miss out on the cold and flu bugs going around back home. When I came home from Iraq I proceeded to catch up on every single sniffle, cough, cold and flu bug I missed out on while deployed the previous year. I was crashing at a buddy's place and for two weeks I didn't move more than ten feet from the couch or bathroom. Half the time I just slept in the tub so when I woke up puking it was easier to clean up afterwards. Thankfully this did not happen to me, but rather one of the Marines I was working with in Afghanistan. In order to get some variety outside of the MRE's and T rations we were eating, every other week or so we'd get local kabobs through the ANP we were co-located with. One of them got a bad kabob and puked and shit his insides out. He essentially lived in a port-a-jon for a few days and lost over 15lbs in less than 36hrs. We didn't get any more kabobs from the locals for awhile.