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forgetting to eat
Friday, February 28 2020
I'd had bad night sweats last night, but I awoke feeling surprisingly good. Maybe this illness wouldn't be a bad one. I got up late and took the dogs for a modest looping walk through the forest. But I could tell things were not as they should've been; the register in my brain of the distance left to walk back to the house was prominent in my conscious thoughts, and it seemed to be taking a long time. Then, because our house was completely out of dog food, I made a run to Barnyard on Route 28, one of the many local places that appears to keep a Lenny from Of Mice and Men on staff. I continued out to the Hurley Ridge Hannaford, where I bought a bento box of sushi, lots of canned beans and such (partly to stockpile against possible coronavirus-induced supply shortages), vegan flavors of Ben & Jerrys (PB & Cookies is really all I buy), some fancy Stone Fear Movie Lions DIPA (in case I'm ever well enough to drink again), and bloody mary mix (which I never mix with alcohol). At the end there, I joked around with the cashier as he labored to pick up the many dimes just given to him by the guy in front of me. He had a real problem, because the surface on which the dimes lay had a shallow lip, preventing the dimes from being brushed over it in any direction. So he had to pick each one up with his fingernails, and it wasn't easy. I might've seemed like I was having a good time, but by then I was completely spent. I didn't even bother to stop at the Tibetan Center thrift store despite having driven right past it; that place is unappealing when you think you're being eaten by microbes. (Besides, it's no fun for me at all these days.)
Back at the house, I that sushi in bed, but it was pretty disappointing. The brown rice (which all the "healthy" sushi features) was hard and unpleasant, and the flavor profile was off. Really good sushi would've been perfect for my appetite, but this was not that. I tried to sleep and I think I succeeded, but it's hard to sleep when you keep feeling the need to cough.
Later this evening, though, I was feeling good enough to watch YouTube videos in front of the fire down in the living room. I also ate some Ben & Jerry's. Surprisingly, whatever my illness was wasn't really affecting what I wanted to eat. The problem was that its symptoms were so overwhelming that they tended to drown out the signal coming from my organs telling me to eat, and I'd just forget to. By now, those symptoms included body aches, headaches, a mild sore throat, and a near-constant desire to cough.
I should mention that the dogs have been very supportive of me during my illness, but the cats keep on doing all the annoying things they usually do, such as being constantly underfoot, demanding things, and climbing in my face. When you're sick, you really don't want a cat to be standing on your chest with their four stabby feet. You don't want that when you're perfectly healthy, but when you're miserable, it's something that can drive you insane. I'd find myself singing the "leave me alone" song (those are the only lyrics), where normally I'd sing about how "I don't want to do cat stuff." One way to get away from the cats is to take a bath, though another is to retreat into one of the rooms they're not allowed in downstairs. I set up a little fortress down in the Gunther Room where I could just be by myself, blasting the heat from the split however hot I wanted it.
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