So this is what it feels like to be sick for three days running.

Late Thursday afternoon, I was driving back from San Diego when my nephew called. He wanted to know if I was going to watch the Democratic debate that night. I took the hint and invited him over and asked him if he’d like dinner too. “Sure!” he said excitedly. When I got back home, I scribbled an order for Ameci Pizza — a large pepperoni pizza, and a large feta cheese pizza, with two dinner salads — handed it and forty bucks to my daughter, and crashed upstairs for half an hour. An hour later, we were all downstairs, the debate on, with me chewing away at my pizza and trying to hear what anyone on the screen was saying while my nephew and my adult son engaged in a loud conversation seemingly about politics but actually about nothing, much in the way that the endless footnotes, end notes, and side notes in a piece by David Foster Wallace claim to shed further light but generally occlude anything that’s happening in the main body.

The debate over, I raced glow-in-the-dark cars for 20 minutes with my daughter, then said I was going to bed, and at the very unfashionable hour of 8:30, because suddenly I wasn’t feeling well. In bed, I checked some things out on my laptop, including an animation of the eruption of Vesuvius that should have served as a cautionary tale. Because within an hour it was being re-enacted in my bathroom — both the eruption and the hot lava.

As in the video, my own version went on for hours and hours, but with one difference. In the video, there’s only one eruption. In my version, there are seven. Plus the concomitant lava flows. That ended, finally, at some point yesterday after first light, followed by two days of sweats and chills and countless gagging threats to repeat the entire ordeal.

Some takeaways:

• If you’re going to be vomiting anyway but desperately need something to drink because now you’re so dehydrated, allow me to recommend Coca Cola. I say that because it takes pretty much the same going up as it does coming down. The same cannot be said for other liquids.
• If you ever sense in advance that you’re going to be ill for hours on end, I recommend that you do not eat the feta cheese pizza. Feta is a pickled curd cheese that has been submerged in brine. Let that sit in your thoughts for a minute
• If you’re home in bed for a few days, nothing, nothing you have recorded on your DVR to watch at a later date looks any good
• Finally, given what you’re going through, when you finally struggle downstairs to watch “The Martian” with your youngest, you can’t help feeling that the guy stranded alone on Mars for a year and a half doesn’t have it nearly so bad

Today, I’m feeling a little better. (After all, I’m writing this.) But yesterday, I was determined to feel better, and stripped the bed and washed the sheets and the comforters, only to wake up soaked again this morning. Either way, I’m not spending another day mostly in bed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2016 at 10:02 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.