How the Flu Works

I'm pretty sure I saw this on the Discovery Channel, but I may have confused some of the details (heh). 

The flu begins its life as a nasty little bug, the kind of bug that none of the other bugs likes because it's always mean and never shares. When it grows up to full bugness, it has achieved Supreme Meanness, and it is ready to take on humanity. 

It jumps into its first victim, where it begins its nefarious plot. The game begins with a clone army, which it prepares in the lungs of the infected, hapless soul, even before that person realizes s/he is sick. The first sign of illness, in fact, is a teeny little cough, which serves the evil bug by dispersing clone minions into other hapless victims -- again, before the cougher even knows s/he is sick.

After the victim has done a few days of the bug's evil, the clone armies begin to march out of the lungs and start tearing up other parts of the body. The victim now realizes s/he is sick because s/he begins to feel nausea, fever, chills, runny nose, headache, etc. In short, the victim feels s/he has been run over by a bulldozer.

The truly evil part of the bug's plan is the nausea. The bug knows that if the victim does not eat or drink enough to keep the body's defenses up, the bug can win. So the victim must stuff him/herself with water, chicken soup, Gatorade, Saltines, and/or Girl Scout "Cinna-Spins" even though they would rather just curl up & die.

All of the battle is going on at the cellular level, so you can't *see* anything. Victims may look flushed from fever or pale from nausea, but they don't have any knife wounds or missing limbs. Thus, it's easy to poke them and call them slackers. But in fact, their metabolism is running so high they are burning more calories than they could wish to eat. This leads to what cyclists call "the bonk," where your body just runs out of energy & shuts down higher functions, like consciousness. And thus, we nap. And nap. And then nap some more. 

I've been sleeping on & off for the last 36 hours, trying to let my body handle the Battle of the Bug. I've avoided drugs because fever is one of your body's natural defenses for these nasty bugs, and it's a good and useful thing as long as it doesn't get up over 103-ish, where it starts frying brain cells (not a great idea). I have this mental image of my body's defenses all lined up & ready for battle, and some Pharmaceutical Pom Pom Squad standing in the way trying to 'help.' No thanks. My body is well-equipped for this battle. 

And so, I'm letting my body handle the mess. I'm tired of coughing, and I really wish I could take some aspirin to stop the general aches but that would reduce the fever too, so, I'll suffer. Actually, rather than suffer, I'll just go back to sleep. Right after I force down another cup of soup. 

Another geeky success

This week, I squeezed in my third adventure in oilfield engineering education. The adventure began as the previous ones did: Instructor goes through the class roster, sees female person from -- what the hell? -- the advertising department, assumes she is going to be a dunce, places her on the front row in the center so he can give her extra attention, which clearly she is going to need, right?

I have to admit that despite my previous success with these classes, I was nervous about this one. The head of engineering training told me that the last two sessions of this class had a 50% failure rate. In English: half of the class failed. Part of the reason for that is that my company holds its engineers to a very high standard: You must achieve an 80% average to pass. The other part is that this class is the first one most of our fledgling engineers take, and some are ill-prepared for the work.

So I went in with a bit of a fear factor. The math for this class was said to be the most intense of all our introductory engineering classes, and math scares me. On the first day, I could barely keep up with the instructor on some of the calculations, and I got very frustrated by my slowness.

These classes are five days long, with a test every day, and total brain stuffing. The first day has a pre-test, just to gauge your knowledge. I got a 47, but that's ok because it doesn't count for anything, and it showed that my brain had plenty of space. Tuesday through Thursday tests measured our ability to use information we'd learned the day before. My scores were 98, 98 & 90, respectively. 

The Thursday test was a big deal because apparently it's the one that caused most of the failures in the previous classes. It put a number of my classmates "on the bubble," as well. I felt good about my 90 because all of my wrong answers were due to my own carelessness -- not my lack of knowledge. Carelessness I can deal with. Being stupid, not so much. 

Thursday night homework didn't go well because I didn't feel well. Maybe something I caught from a classmate who felt poopy on Monday & Tuesday? Seriously medicated myself for Friday. Upon checking homework on Friday morning, I found I'd totally messed up a page of calculations. Took me 15 minutes to find my error, but I did. Stupid carelessness!

For the 80-question final exam, we were allotted 3.5 hours. The exam was 60 1-point multiple choice & then 20 two-point calculation questions of the type where if you get one wrong, all the ones underneath are also wrong. You calculate one thing, which you use to calculate the next, and then use one or both of those to calculate something else. Carelessness = high failure potential.

Friday's instructor was not the guy we'd had earlier in the week. I finished in 1.5 hours and the instructor gave me a look that might have been either, "Did you just give up?!" or "Holy shit, you're done?!" Then he graded it and grinned. I got a 96. I can live with that.

But this flu/cold/poopy-feeling thing is not so good.

I have my shots

I feel like I am a dog when I say that I went with my parents to get our shots yesterday. (I would have blogged immediately afterward, but Blogger was down...)

In another 9 days, I will be immune from Yellow Fever, one of those nasty mosquito-borne diseases that you only have to worry about in tropical climes. Houston is, apparently, not tropical enough. But some parts of Brazil are, which is why mom, dad & I paddled up through the wet weather yesterday to get Yellow Fever vaccinations. They are not required for the places we are headed, but they have been recommended. So we got 'em.

Unlike some shots (I think the flu shot may be one) where the nurse tries to jab the needle deep into a muscle, the Yellow Fever shot is subcutaneous -- just under the skin. Or so the nurse said as she looked at me, the brave one, going first. "It will bubble a bit," she added.

"Bubble?" I asked as she stuck the needle just under the skin of my forearm and started pushing the plunger.

"Bubble" was the perfect word for it. It was like a ripple as the fluid was injected in there, ripping one layer of skin from whatever skin is attached to under there. And thus, it did not feel great. But it was cool to see, and I was busily letting my eyes keep my brain from noticing the pain when dad suddenly spoke.

"Did you *watch*?!" His voice was a mixture of surprise, horror and respect.

"Of course I watched. It was totally cool," I responded. "Was I not supposed to watch?"

Mom, next up, responded. "I can assure you that I'm not going to watch."

In fact, mom looked completely away and winced. "It huuuurts!"

"It's like a bee sting," I offered helpfully.

"Big damn bee," mom responded tersely.

Dad avers that it did not hurt at all. He did not, however, watch the bubbling. He claims that once the needle was in, he watched it all, but by the time he turned his head, it was all over. Ask the nurse. She'll tell you.

And it did *not* hurt that much. But it itches like a sun-of-a-gun now.

To See or Not to See

I had Lasik some years ago on my left eye. As a child, I had a bit of a lazy eye -- the left one wandered a bit. As a result, the left eye was much weaker than the right, which was just slightly nearsighted. I wore glasses & contacts for years, and then I was convinced to try the laser surgery.

Unlike many people, I had a bad experience with it. I had terrible, awful dry eye after the procedure, and I never felt my vision was as good as it had been with glasses. This was partly the result of the dryness. The layer of fluid is a lens, of a sort. But it was never bad enough to go back to glasses or contact lenses -- just something to squint through.

Last year, I went to an ophthalmologist, who said that in his opinion, my vision was still not bad enough to warrant glasses. In addition, my nearsightedness has delayed the onset of presbyopia -- the need for bifocals. So I happily continued my squinting.

Well, I'm tired of squinting. So I went to a "therapeutic optometrist" today. I'm not sure how a "therapeutic optometrist" is different fom a plain old optometrist, but this place was on my insurance company's list of preferred vision care providers, so that's where I went.

If you haven't been to the eye doctor for a while, it's worth a trip just to see all the cool toys. Among the video games we played was one that measures your peripheral vision. You click a mouse every time you see a flash of light. After a while, you begin to wonder whether you're seeing new flashes of white light or ghosts from the previous flash of white light. Very fun. I wonder if they are measuring reaction time as much as they are measuring peripheral vision.... I didn't get a prize, but the nice young doc also didn't try to talk me out of driving home...

Anyway, the doc was a nice fella who said I don't need a very strong prescription, but he could certainly understand if I'm tired of squinting and particularly have trouble driving at night. (I actually don't have any more trouble driving at night than I do during the day, but then, I don't drive at night very often. The problem is reading street signs or anything else more than 3 feet from my face -- day or night.) Anyway he was sympathetic to my desire to see clearly at distance. He did warn me, however, that if I get glasses for distance, I should always take them off to read. He even showed me why. Very instructive.

And so the optical dispenser gals, a couple of cute 20-somethings with little nose pierces, helped me pick out some new driving & movie-watching glasses. (What's weird is that one had her pierce on the left nostril & one had it on the right. It felt wrong, like something was out of sync.) I believe they helped me pick out something stylish and yet not ridiculous for a person my age....

Now, we wait. Seven to 10 more days of squinting.

No gain?

It's now two days since the 2:08, and I have not had any pain. If you live by the 'no pain/no gain" rule, then I wasted two hours of my Sunday, but two hours of sunshine is always good. Unless you live by the 'avoid sun or die of skin cancer" rule, in which case I really had a bad Sunday.

The ankles, in particular, didn't care one whit about the bike ride. In fact, riding a bike is the one exercise that my doctor actually recommended if I felt a need to sweat. It's non-weight-bearing and really has very limited ankle movement (some, but nothing like the elliptical machine), so as far as the ankles are concerned, the bike ride was a non-event.

I'm thinking about getting a new seat, and sometimes I think about getting a new bike. Then I look at the bike and the seat and think, "You have a perfectly good seat on a perfectly good bike. And you have another bike in the corner over there. Stop this nonsense immediately." The practical Smukke is not nearly as much fun as the silly Smukke, but she does have a nice house.

Bike #2 is a mountain bike. The ex & I bought a pair of these one year as an anniversary gift. I rode mine once & realized I hate mountain biking. I rode it a few more times after that but I really do not like being out of control, having roots, ruts and gravel grabbing my wheel & trying to tip me over, and having constant threats of pain & worse. When I was explaining this to my boss at the office today, he pretty much summed up the mountain bike experience: "If you aren't bleeding when you get home, you didn't have fun."

The bike is a few years older than the snazzy, shiny thing on the Trek site, and it's bright yellow. It's actually not bad for geocaching because it does allow you to follow nice trails off into recreational areas where geocachers like to hide things. However, it's not nearly as much fun in a daily basis as a road bike, which can take you to the grocery store for milk, the library for a new load of books, or over to mom & dad's with the paper.

My road bike is a sweetheart, but she's a hybrid road/touring bike, a Trek 400. When I went to look for a link, I found it under "vintage steel road bikes." (sigh). I bought her in the late 1980s when I was living in NJ and needed to replace my 9000-lb Sears monster. She has ridden innumerable centuries (100 miles in a day), one double century (200 miles in a day) and across the US (LA to Boston, but no, not in a day). She's a hard worker, is happy to carry panniers (which I use almost all the time to carry stuff) and has no problems. She is not as shiny as she once was, and she is not a color I would choose on purpose, but I can't really justify replacing her.

Ellipticality!!

The ankles are fine, says me. I don't need to spend $xx to have a medical doctor tell me that I'm healed. I jumped on the elliptical machine for 10 minutes on Monday night and 20 minutes last night. I am fine, just fine.

Oh, sure, I still feel twinges. Sure, my ankles are still a little larger than normal. But I'm fine. Today I even parked in the normal parking lot, walked the half mile (<-- exaggeration alert) to my building and took the stairs up to my third-floor office.

In short, it was a normal day. It was even a fairly normal weather day, with temps back near 80 (79 and sunny on my way home, according to the car's thermometer) and loads of sunshine. It's the kind of day that we are due after two days of working out inside.

The dog is panting her tongue out, having just come in from a fine romp around the backyard with her favorite ball. If she gets her breath back before dark, we'll go back out there for a few more minutes later on, just to make sure we've maximized her potential energy release.

No news on the dating front. I wish I could help you live more vicariously but there is just not much to say. I'm frustrated by guys who are 47 - 52 and only interested in women 28 - 35. I am frustrated by guys who never respond. I am frustrated by guys who play games with names & photos to see which version of themselves attracts the best fish.

There's a great Tim Allen routine that pretty much sums up my PMS-laden frustrations at the moment: "Men are pigs."

I vaguely remember that this is one reason why I've never been much into 'dating.'

X-ray says....

.... that I'm healing up just fine & won't need any hardware surgically screwed into my bones. *phew!*

Doc also wants me to "wean" off the crutches, which means start trying to get around with just one crutch, then just walk in the boot. In 14 days, I am to be hobbling around without crutches. Meanwhile, I'm allowed to drive, even the manual transmission Mini, as long as the boot doesn't get in the way of the pedals.

Why is it that hearing these words from the Doc makes it *poof* ok to do this stuff? One second after mom dropped me in my driveway, I was in my garage trying out the clutch pedal, then taking the Mini for a spin around the block. An hour earlier, if you had suggested that I do such a thing, I'd have thought you were trying to kill me. Go figure.

I did use both crutches today, until I got home. I figure it makes no sense to hurt myself at work & not be able to drive home. But now that I'm here, I left one crutch at the back door. But after only dealing with the dog & dinner, I'm fixin' to go fetch it. No use overdoing it. But I'm not going to be sorry to see the crutches go back into the closet (forever).

This morning, I picked up a temporary handicap tag so I don't have to hobble the half mile from the parking lot to my office. Instead, I walk about 5 steps. Opening doors is still an interesting issue. Doors are not my friend. The bathroom door at work, in particular, weighs about 20 tons and has a very tight return spring. It has tried to kill me or at least knock down a crutch a number of times, but so far I have managed to sneak past it. The car door also likes to snap at my boot.

Regardless, I'm still me: It was not raining on the way home from work, so the top was down. I'm ok with driving, although I would not wish to take a long road trip or sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic for any period of time.

Mom & dad had a nice giggle at my expense the other night. Mom drove me to the doctor's office Wednesday afternoon. Apparently it tickles my parents to no end that at their age, they are still taking their child to the doctor, rather than the reverse. I suppose at some level I'm tickled, too.