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chainsaw-powered recovery
Saturday, March 17 2007
At a little after midnight this morning I took some Advil (Ibuprofen) and went back to sleep, finally have a restful (though sweat-soaked) night, no thanks to the valium I'd taken.
There might have been as much as 18 inches of snow on the ground, on average (given that had difted to various depths depending on the local landforms and wind obstacles). Since I was in no shape for digging us out, Gretchen had called a guy to plow us out, but he was so busy that he wouldn't get to us today. At some point our friends Penny and David came by to drop off fresh New York City bagels, though they didn't stay long. Having suffered now for so long from this flu, I couldn't really understand anyone wanting to get anywhere near us. (Indeed, when I'd been at my sickest I'd been narrowing down a list of suspects who had possibly given me the disease and plotting vengeance against them.)
Today, though, seemed to be going somewhat better than previous days. I was able to sit comfortably by the fire for long stretches reading or surfing the web. And I hadn't needed medication since midnight last night.
At around 3pm, though, I had a bit of relapse and needed to take more Advil, followed immediately by another sweaty nap lasting about an hour. After taking a bath, I suddenly was compelled by the need to rescue the electric chainsaw from the doghouse, half-buried in snow. So I went out and started digging a path to its door. The snow was heavy and I was weak, but I managed to do as I'd set out to do. When I returned to the house with the chainsaw, I suddenly realized that I was famished. Up until this point the only thing I'd been eating for the past few days had been toast. But now I wanted a bagel, one with cheese, lettuce, mustard and (had I known we had an open can of it) sauerkraut. This is not the sort of food eaten by sick people.
After eating my bagel, I realized my throat was no longer sore. What was more, I felt energized by the food in my stomach and no longer had a desire to return to bed. When I next measured my temperature, it had fallen from its normal resting place of between 101 and 102 to a little above 99.
The surest sign that I was finally well came later after I went to bed. In the space of two hours I had my first coherent dream in days. It had a plot, lots of little allegorical nooks, and none of that dreary mathematical pretense of my fever dreams. In this dream I was carrying the new gas-powered chainsaw Gretchen recent gave me, and I was trying to get to some part of my parents' land but was blocked by the side of a dilapidated barn. So I climbed through a hole in the wall of that barn and suddenly found myself in a very different world. Someone was shouting at me to put my weapon down and come out with my hands up. Unaccountably, there were two other people in there with me with weapons who were also being addressed by this order. So I dropped the chainsaw, worrying I'd destroyed it before ever having a chance to pull its starter cord. And then suddenly I was in a brightly-lit room surrounded by a bunch of hip 20-somethings. And for some reason now I was telling them stories which they found very entertaining and engaging. One of them, a woman who was specified in the dream as being less attractive than Gretchen, was being sort of bitchy to me. But her type was so familiar to me that I brushed it off, knowing exactly how to relate to her. Eventually she came over and sort of pressed her lips against my cheek and lingered for a moment. At that point a mysterious icon-rich cheat sheet appeared before my eyes, with symbols color-coded in red and grey for proper responses for how to either encourage or discourage her advances. So I thought, what the hell, and encouraged her. Some minutes later the group of us all went "into town" (wherever that was) where we ran into Gretchen, who was dressed up like a vixen in shimmery silver-colored silk. She was angry at me for not having told that girl I'd just kissed that I was, you know, married. "But how did you find out?" I wanted to know. What angered Gretchen more, though, was that I'd stupidly left the chainsaw back at that dilapidated barn. "But I can go back there tomorrow and get it," I assured her.
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