ill

My boss came in this afternoon and said he'd had a bad night at a friend's place yesterday: he'd had some sort of yogurt smoothie because he hadn't eaten dinner, then while at his friend's place, he was persuaded to guzzle a beer. The boss theorized that the combination proved sickening because he ended up rushing to the friend's bathroom and puking. 

He still wasn't feeling well today, so he went home early. I started off the morning just fine, but toward the end of the day, I was running a bit of a fever and feeling slightly lightheaded. I stayed a bit past my scheduled time of 8:15 p.m., leaving at closer to 8:40 after woozily typing some blog comments and the daily email that I write to myself to keep track of my comp time (comp time is an informal thing; even my boss doesn't really care about it, but I do). I dragged myself out of the office and first tried to catch a cab, but at 8:45 in the evening, all the taxis are going west, away from Jamshil and toward Yangjae, and very rarely are cabs going eastward. So after five minutes of standing there like an idiot, I lugged my shivering self down to Daechi Station, which is just a few feet away.*

A train pulled up pretty quickly, and while I had a gentle urge to pee, there were no colonic urges such as happened that horrible night. I rode back to Daecheong Station, picked up a mystery package from my lobby's front desk, then headed up to my place. I cleaned my toe wound, and now, I'm going to wash my cotton sock (a nightly ritual thanks to the bloodprint left from several hours' seepage), turn up my ondol floor heater, take some TheraFlu, then crawl into bed much, much earlier than usual—before 10 p.m. by my reckoning (I'm more normally a 3 a.m.-at-the-earliest kind of guy). I'm guaranteed to wake up extremely early tomorrow, so maybe whatever blogging I fail to do tonight will get done in the wee hours.

Is it COVID? I hear you fart. I'm pretty sure it's not. COVID is primarily a viral lung infection. While fever might be one symptom of several variants of COVID, the virus definitely infects the lungs, so there ought to be lung-related and nasopharynx-related problems like coughing and sneezing. Right now, it's just a slight fever, a bit of lightheadedness, and a tiny bit of skin sensitivity—all stuff I've experienced before. If TheraFlu doesn't help, I'll go down to our lobby pharmacy tomorrow and get the multisymptom cold reliever. If that fails, I'll mask up (for what that's worth) and see the doc in Mido.

This is my first real illness in years. Ever since I started distance walking, colds have been a problem maybe only once or twice over the last several years. I haven't been seriously walking since getting back from Andong last October, though, so I don't doubt that my immune system, formerly used to being exposed to and toughened up by the Great Outdoors, has gotten flabby. It's possible that my fever, etc., isn't from my boss: maybe he's right about yogurt and beer not mixing well for him. But as I said, I was fine in the morning, and I didn't have a fever until the afternoon. So I kind of suspect my boss. If I'm hit with nausea, that'll be a big hint that my suspicion is right.

Expect an update tomorrow. Otherwise, g'night, y'all.

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*Why not just take the subway? you queef noisily. Because to get into and out of Daechi, you have to traverse about 9 or 10 flights of stairs from the platform to the street. At the subway-platform level, there's an escalator that takes you up three of those flights, but unless you're handicapped, you're on your own for the rest. I'm a walker, but I'm also lazy.