The Alien

The last two weeks have been a fevered blur to me. Something, likely a virus, has taken over my body and rendered me senseless. This is not a good thing for a person who feels responsibility for keeping the world running. However, the frailty of the human condition sometimes intrudes on our perceived invulnerability.

I’ve been a lucky person. I’ve only been hospitalized for births: my own and those of my children. Doctors were around for inoculations and an occasional antibiotic. Suddenly, I am seeing my doctor three times in a single week and the people at the lab look at me with sympathetic eyes and the four bottles of tabasco sauce (blood) I gave them to culture give me an insatiable taste for tomato juice.

Which leads to the next problem: everything tastes awful. I barely eat. Excellent, I’ll lose weight, I think (always looking for the bright side)… but in fact, after two full weeks of near starvation, I have gained 8 pounds. And… I have no swelling in my fingers or ankles that would indicate it’s fluid. Is there an alien being growing inside?

I know that it’s not growing in my abdomen, because I had an ultrasound yesterday.

So I sit and ponder and have faith that soon this will be a distant memory and both the alien and the fever it brought with it will depart.