I
’m down with flu, writing in a NyQuil-induced fog, having taken
enough to fell a cow yet still not successful at getting my
insomniac self to sleep.
I’m down with flu, writing in a NyQuil-induced fog, having taken enough to fell a cow yet still not successful at getting my insomniac self to sleep. I came down with it on Saturday night, after a Friday night of no sleep, my weakened immune system unable to fend off the germs carried by sneezes and coughs from other people at the Renaissance Faire Saturday. After a pretty full day, I came home at 4 pm to rest before attending the Day Worker Center fundraising dinner at St. Catherine’s, which was to begin at 5:30. As the telltale scratch at the back and sides of my throat appeared, I dressed into my pajamas at 5 pm, sorry that I was going to miss yet another Day Worker Center function.
I woke up this morning, my voice two octaves lower. On some women, it sounds sexy, but to me, I sound like Mercedes McCambridge in The Exorcist. I asked my daughter to fetch some NyQuil tablets and some milk at the store (I needed the NyQuil, we were out of milk). She looked at me with the kind of empathy only she has, and left on her errand. There’s the beauty of having kids old enough to drive.
After lying down and trying to read myself to sleep, the space behind my eyeballs is hot, like there’s a space heater there, and the heat seeps out the top onto my eyelashes and my eyelids. When I close my eyes, my face gets hot from keeping all the heat in, and I see and feel fire. My hands are cold. The sides of my throat closest to my tonsils feel like they’ve undergone a chemical peel. My back, arms and neck ache as if I carried around 25-pound toddlers all day. I cough deeply and have that tinny aftertaste when I’ve dislodged something that was annoying me, only to feel somewhere deep in my throat that same tickle again. Would that I would emerge from this with rock-hard abs from all the coughing that happens just because of that little tickle.
My too-hot eyeballs scan the paper, as I can’t even go back to bed without having at least tried to read my newspapers. The headlines swim before me. However, one comes into focus telling me that the U.S. is not prepared for a flu pandemic.
We depend too much on one vaccine maker. I majored in English literature, not business, but I do understand the problem of carrying too much inventory and the possibility of stockpiling too much of something that has an expiration date. And we’d need to quarantine folks like me, people feeling so miserable, all they can think about – or talk about – are their symptoms. Can’t tell you what a blast shift that would be for health workers. If our current administration is in charge of any mobilization against any disaster like this, go ahead and just kill me now.
Intelligent design vs. evolution is also getting a lot of press lately. As a believer in a higher power, and as someone who was at the center of an evolution vs. creationism debate among some folks at my church in Texas, (it’s a long story, but suffice to say, the administration of the church religious education program and even the pope backed me up. We didn’t ask the pope specifically, but, very conveniently, in 1996, he had visited the U.S. just weeks before, and addressed this very topic) I wanted to be open to this intelligent design concept.
However, last night, trying to fall asleep, I watched a fascinating program on Einstein and his discovery of e=mc2. Unlike all the subjects in the program, none of the things I’ve read or heard about intelligent design ask a question or test anything. It comes down to a “well, we can’t explain this, so it must be … intelligent design!”
I left the sciences at the end of my sophomore year in college to study literature because in literature, we discussed the nature of evil. We discussed philosophy, history, social science, religion. It’s where the concept of intelligent design belongs, too. Not in the science class.
Now, back to my symptoms … I woke up today with a craving for chocolate cheesecake on a stick. What’s that about?
Columnist Dina Campeau is a wife, mother of two teens and a resident of Morgan Hill. Her work for the last seven years has focused on affordable housing and homeless issues in Santa Clara County. Her column will be published each Friday. Reach her at dc******@*****er.net.
