Un conditional...
Another year: Day the Eightieth
Well, that was unpleasant. So there was this song back when I was a kid that talked about the 'condition my condition was in'. Yesterday my condition reared its ugly head at a relatively inopportune time and I got to go through some of the more extreme aspects of the condition. Without getting into gory details let's just accept that squishy biological things happen and when they do a short time later I get hit with the whammy that is associated with it. The whammy comes in the form of, what non-medical experts (ie 'us') call a septic shock reaction. It starts out as kind of a thrill that runs up my spine and is a precursor to an achy hunched over sensation that eventually becomes a full blown case of involuntary shakes, usually accompanied by a short duration fever. If I get this sequence of events and am at home I can often deflect the worst of it by immediately taking some Tylenol and crawling into a pile of blankets.
Yesterday however, I was in town and as a result I had to deal with two separate instances of going from a warm place through the minus fifteen outside temperatures and back into a warm place. The result was that instead of having a miserable shivery time I got to experience full blown, violent shaking as my body tried to compensate for what it seemed to think was dangerously low core temperatures. The second instance, when we got home, ended up seeing me sitting on the hearth in front of the fire trying to keep my teeth from clacking together. Eventually...maybe a half hour or forty minutes after the shaking started I was down to a dull roar and able to lie under a pile of blankets in the great room, riding out the last bits of the shake-storm.
The really sucky part of this process is that all that violent shaking and *tensing* means that the next day (today) you feel like you've been worked over by some very enthusiastic discworld thugs.
So the long and short is that I had a horrible then, a lousy today and will work on recovery tomorrow. The good news is that whatever-the-heck-it-is (trust me when this has come up in conversations with my MDs I get a look that seems to shout WTF) rarely has any longer term consequences. Within a day or two I'm back in the pink and the ugliness is a memory. Also, my neck tends to be a stiff as hell (from all that tensing and shaking).
Here's to a normal might's sleep and quickly leaving that nastiness behind.
Well, that was unpleasant. So there was this song back when I was a kid that talked about the 'condition my condition was in'. Yesterday my condition reared its ugly head at a relatively inopportune time and I got to go through some of the more extreme aspects of the condition. Without getting into gory details let's just accept that squishy biological things happen and when they do a short time later I get hit with the whammy that is associated with it. The whammy comes in the form of, what non-medical experts (ie 'us') call a septic shock reaction. It starts out as kind of a thrill that runs up my spine and is a precursor to an achy hunched over sensation that eventually becomes a full blown case of involuntary shakes, usually accompanied by a short duration fever. If I get this sequence of events and am at home I can often deflect the worst of it by immediately taking some Tylenol and crawling into a pile of blankets.
Yesterday however, I was in town and as a result I had to deal with two separate instances of going from a warm place through the minus fifteen outside temperatures and back into a warm place. The result was that instead of having a miserable shivery time I got to experience full blown, violent shaking as my body tried to compensate for what it seemed to think was dangerously low core temperatures. The second instance, when we got home, ended up seeing me sitting on the hearth in front of the fire trying to keep my teeth from clacking together. Eventually...maybe a half hour or forty minutes after the shaking started I was down to a dull roar and able to lie under a pile of blankets in the great room, riding out the last bits of the shake-storm.
The really sucky part of this process is that all that violent shaking and *tensing* means that the next day (today) you feel like you've been worked over by some very enthusiastic discworld thugs.
So the long and short is that I had a horrible then, a lousy today and will work on recovery tomorrow. The good news is that whatever-the-heck-it-is (trust me when this has come up in conversations with my MDs I get a look that seems to shout WTF) rarely has any longer term consequences. Within a day or two I'm back in the pink and the ugliness is a memory. Also, my neck tends to be a stiff as hell (from all that tensing and shaking).
Here's to a normal might's sleep and quickly leaving that nastiness behind.