I’ve got chills, they’re multiplyin’ …

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor N o, it’s not an homage to “Grease” – although my daughter does have a role in the Academies of West Memphis Drama Department’s upcoming production of the classic musical, so the song has been in my head lately.

That’s probably why it immediately came to mind as I found myself in that odd state of somehow being both hot and cold at the same time late Thursday night while running a fever and shivering even under a blanket.

Yes, I’m sick … I seem to be on the back end of it at least, but I’m still pretty cruddy, to be honest. It’s weird. I used to be guaranteed four or five significant “cold and flu-like symptoms” episodes annually. And that’s on top of the “seasonal allergies” that I get, that thankfully only last from April to March (sigh).

But ironically, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, I haven’t been sick. Not really even a little. I guess that at first, it was simply because I wasn’t around anyone to catch a bug from. We were all sheltering in place, social distancing, staying in our “bubble” and all that, so I was good.

Even after they started opening things up, we wore masks and I still largely stayed away from crowds. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t even get COVID-19, even though literally everyone else in my family got it – some multiple times. And over the past four years, I haven’t needed to go to the doctor for anything other than some “old man” ailments with my neck and shoulder.

But maybe the pandemic is truly over, because whatever grace period I’ve been under for the past few years definitely came to an end over the weekend. On Thursday night, I threw up everything I had eaten that day (maybe that week). That included a bunch of raw oysters, so I chalked it up to maybe overindulging.

But then the fever came. And it stayed. We were in Gulf Shores on a Spring Break trip with my daughter’s softball team (photos on Page 9) so we were at a rented condo and I did not have a thermometer, so I don’t know exactly how hot I got (but, yes, also cold). I do know I was dripping sweat and their was possibly steam coming off of my body.

The next it was time to load up and go home, which was both good and bad. Good because that meant I could recuperate in my own home, but bad because it meant an 8-hour ride back to Arkansas (which by the way, became a 9-hour ride since the powers that be closed down the Old Bridge on Spring Break, with the NCAA tournament in town).

I mostly just tried to sleep and we only had to stop twice so I could throw up what little I had been able to keep down (water and crackers mostly). I was certainly miserable. Fortunately, the nausea finally went away.

Oh, but that’s when the coughing and congestion kicked in. I still am not sure if I had food poisoning and then the flu or if it was all just one big illness that expressed its way in progressively horrible ways but I spent the rest of Friday and all day Saturday hacking and coughing and running more fever.

It is at this point that I should explain that I am a terrible sick person. I get completely pitiful. As a kid, my Mom was perfectly fine with pandering to my every need. My wife, not to much. She tries, but after driving the whole way home from Gulf Shores and listening to me whine for two days, by Saturday, she was through, leaving me to fend for myself. She said it was because I kept demanding she “stop all the coughing” when she had COVID-19, but she probably doesn’t understand how hard it is to sleep when the person next to you in bed is like, “hack, hack … wheeze” all night (the nerve, right?).

Anyway, I was still pretty sick on Sunday, so I just stayed in bed most of the day (I’d hate to be a burden on anyone). By that point, I’d coughed so much my ribs hurt, and I had a nosebleed so bad that my bathroom sink looked like the Prom scene from Carrie (and I probably ruined one of my wife’s nice hand towels, but I tossed that sucker, so nobody say nothing).

By Monday morning, I decided I probably wasn’t going to die. In case you’re wondering, I did take a COVID test. It came back negative, so that’s 0-for-9 for you, coronavirus. You haven’t gotten me yet! I’m still hacking quite a bit – just enough to annoy my wife, really. So, I guess I’m on the road to recovery. In the meantime, I’m drinking lots of fluids (chocolate milk is a fluid, right?) and milking as much sympathy from my family as I can.

I may, however, never eat oysters again …