I seem to have every symptom for flu except for fever at the moment. It started yesterday with a mild sore throat that persisted into today. Then, around 3pm today, everything else hit:
All types of flu can cause:
* Fever
* Coughing and/or sore throat
* Runny or stuffy nose
* Headaches and/or body aches
* Chills
* Fatigue
-courtesy flu.gov
In addition to the above, webmd.com lists “ill appearance with warm, flushed skin and red, watery eyes” as a common flu symptom. Well, I have that, too.
It all started yesterday, when I developed a mild sore throat sometime in the afternoon. I’d worked ‘holiday daycare’, which means I spent much of the day inside, rather than outside, in close quarters with preschoolers. Several of the little buggers have wet coughs and runny noses. Some have clear snot, some have yellow or green snot.
The day before that, on Tuesday, I’d opened a door to a teacher’s classroom, gone inside and asked her if she had any eyedroppers and bottles that my co-teacher and I could use for our seed propagation project. She’d said she did not have any. This conversation is relevant later.
By the time I got home from work yesterday afternoon, I was feeling run-down. I’d had a crappy dinner, and asked for Tuckers ice cream (thus violating my sugar ban on the fourth day). Tuckers uses cow’s milk, like every other ice creamery does. I’m not supposed to have cow’s milk. Hello cravings! Within a few minutes of beginning to eat the ice cream, my stomach began to gurgle wildly. Hello lactose intolerance!
An hour of eating the ice cream, I got sharp stabbing uterine pains. This is reproducible 100% of the time, and yet I keep going back to eating dairy foods. The reason I get the pain is that dairy, especially cow’s milk, contains inflammatory prostalandins. For more info on that, read here, here and here. This may be relevant later.
This morning, my joints were aching. My knees and lower back were bugging me, so I decided not to bicycle to work, and to drive, instead. It’s the first time since November 2nd that I drove my car instead of biking to work, so I felt like the break from biking was okay. Plus, there was a chance of rain today, and I didn’t want to get caught in it like I was last week.
The uterine pain continued intermittently throughout today. After the children went inside from lunch recess, I began sweeping up the yard. My co-worker brought out lemon-scented Clorox wipes and began wiping down the tables. I gagged, the bleach scent was so strong. I looked over to double-check the type of wipes she was using and it was indeed the yellow label - the only label I thought I was still okay with. Dammit. Stupid chemical sensitivities.
As I continued to sweep the yard, my eyes began to water with thick gooey fluid. That’s when I knew for sure that my recent bout of eye allergies are triggered by the workplace. This may be relevant later.
I was on my lunch break when I sat upright on the couch in the lounge and nearly yelped from the pelvic pain. It felt like my uterus had been locked in one place and I was moving against it. So having consumed ice cream still had its effects on me. This too may be relevant later.
Around 3pm, as I was closing up my classroom for the day, I went to the open children’s bathroom and emptied out a container of dirty water into a sink. The noise of the water emptying from the container made me nauseous. My mind flooded with images of me puking water non-stop. This imagery made me want to vomit of course. The last time I was this ill from hearing water or other fluids pouring was when I was on a mushroom trip. Immediately following this imagery, I wondered if I would be getting that sick in the near future, and this was my body’s way of giving me a head’s up.
I went back outside to my classroom and wrapped up the data for our daily record book. While doing that, I was seized with severe fatigue, low and mid back pain so strong I wanted to cry, and a general blurry feeling all over. It’s hard to explain, but it’s similar to how I feel when I’m in a lot of pain from endometriosis. The world around me looks different - not so bright, and kind of blurry - and my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton.
By the time I got home from work, around 3:45pm, I had severe chills.
I turned on the heater fan, the house furnace and put a heating pad under the covers. I changed into pajamas and went to bed and napped for a bit. I was freezing under two blankets, with the heating pad set to medium, with the heater fan going, and the furnace set to 70°F.
The thing is, with all that I’ve listed, most of it fits the bill for the premenstrual pain and suffering that I routinely experience, up to two weeks before george.
However, I remembered the scene from early this morning when I got in to work - the office was scrambling to avoid having a teacher come in to work. She’d called to say she has the flu, but that she couldn’t afford for hers and her students’ sake to miss any class time, so she’d be coming in only for a little while. The office was trying to decide whether or not to go to her house to prevent her from leaving, or to meet her at the front door and shoo her away. As it was, I heard later, that teacher DID show up to work to deliver some classroom materials, and the office staff shooed her away.
This is the same teacher - I’d opened the door to her classroom and I spoke to her on Tuesday.
Could be that she’s the infection point. Could be the children with their wet coughs and runny noses every day. Hell, we’d had a case of swine flu a couple weeks ago, and the staff decided to suppress the news, saying the mother said the child developed symptoms at home, not at school, and she kept him home for days. I found out because his teacher spilled the beans to me. Good times, eh? Covering up swine flu, a teacher coming in despite knowing full well she has the flu. No wonder the world still gets epidemics and pandemics. Stupid people.
…When I woke from my nap this afternoon, I checked out flu symptoms at flu.gov and then called my doctor’s office. It was 20 minutes to closing time, but I asked if I could be seen. They’d just stopped taking patients 10 minutes before I called, but asked me what was going on, and then did a run-down of symptoms checking with me. I was told I’d get a call back.
The on-call nurse called me back, we went over the symptoms again, and she told me she was pretty sure I have the flu, and that the doctor herself would call me back. She asked if I have had the flu shot. I told her I’d refused it because I have egg allergy (many vaccines, including the flu shot, are made with egg protein). She replied, “Oh! No you can’t get the shot, then.” Glad she didn’t fight me on the decision.
A little while later, the doctor called, and we went through the symptoms one more time. By this time, I had facial flushing, headache growing worse, sensitivity to light getting worse (all the lights in the house were off). As I ticked off my symptoms, I mentioned the back pain which came on suddenly and so severe that I wanted to cry.
The doctor interrupted me and said, “yeah, ya know, I’m sorry, but you have the flu, and tomorrow you WILL have a fever. You can NOT go to work. I’m sorry.”
She faxed in a doctor’s note to cover me for tomorrow, and told me to call back if I need an extension for next week.
We discussed over-the-counter remedies to help me through the flu (Tylenol, Advil, Pseudoephedrine), and she mentioned Tamiflu. I told her I would not feel comfortable pursuing Tamiflu based upon the side effects I’d read about, the fact that I’m super sensitive to all medications (I’ve hallucinated on prescribed minimum dosages of Tagamet, for example) and well, the news reports in general over the years. The doctor did not argue with me - in fact she said that taking Tamiflu only reduces symptoms by 1-2 days, and there’s only a select group of people she’d be willing to press to take Tamiflu.
When I got off the phone with the doctor, I broke the news to my husband, and added “I don’t want to be sick. I want to think she’s got it wrong. Maybe it’s just early george symptoms.”
Maybe it’s allergies. Maybe it’s because of the cow’s milk. Maybe it’s all of the above, but still not the flu.
It’s taken me a couple of hours to chronicle everything. In that time, it’s gotten very dark outside and I’ve turned on the overhead light. The light in the room, as well as the monitor brightness (which I keep reducing) has not helped with the stinging eye pain. I’m sore behind the eyes as well as experiencing the stinging in the eyes.
Meh.
So there is my über detailed influenza report, should I need it for the doctor, and non-influenza report, should I need to refer back to it again in case of ingestion of cow’s milk.
Stupid cows.
