February 2020 will go down in my history as a very, very bad month. I would say I want a do-over, but that sounds too painful, so I'm moving onward and upward. March 1st never sounded so good.
February started with me still reeling from the end of January, which had me going on a very last minute work trip to Chicago. I had two days to prepare, but I've been there many times before so that part wasn't daunting. The daunting part was that usually I travel there with either my husband or with a set of close friends who also work the same exam as I do. This time I was on my own. Staying at a fancy pants hotel all by yourself is a bit pathetic.
The work situation ended up being horridly disaster-ridden. I can't even divulge what happened, just a technology fail of epic proportions. The only good thing about the trip was seeing my friends in the Romanian congregation in Skokie. There's never a lack of new and fun places to visit in Chicago, and my friends were kind enough to come pick me up at my lonely hotel and drive me around town to explore all the vegan options, which seem endless.
That trip took a lot out of me, so I started February off dragging. A few days in I had to drag myself to jury duty where I was forced to sit next to an obviously ill woman who was hacking and coughing the whole time. As interesting as the jury selection process was, and as funny as the judge was, my overwhelming memory of the experience was thinking "She'd better not get me sick, she'd better not get me sick." Sure enough, a few days later, while at a conference in Santa Rosa with my husband, I got sick.
For the next two and a half weeks I was a walking medical dictionary for every possible symptom of a head cold. Fever, headache, double viral pink eye, earache, sore throat, coughing - the list went on and on. About this time the whole Coronavirus thing was picking up speed, and my call in to my doctor about the pink eye was met with "Have you been to any affected areas lately?" Chicago, a jury selection room in Sacramento and Santa Rosa, that was it. It was a doozy of a cold, but I could happily conclude it was of the most common variety. Hot tea, lemon, honey, some Jagermeister and Netflix got me through.
So what else happened in this most dreadful month? Oh, just a trip to the ER for my husband, who passed out after a bout of possible Norovirus. Yep, while I was still so sick, my husband gave me the scare of a lifetime (which can be added to all the other scares of a lifetime he's given me) and had me on the phone with 911 one morning as his BP dropped to a frightening level. The dispatcher asked me how old he was. I'm sure she could have used a ballpark number, but I couldn't remember exactly and when I asked him. that's the point where he completely blacked out. I was screaming "How OLD are you?" so loud, I cringe in embarrassment still. That dispatcher must have thought we needed some serious help, because very soon our living room was filled with paramedics. By this time he woke up, we both knew how old he was and the rest of the morning was spent in the ER finding out he was and is in great shape.
So what else happened? Somewhere in there I gave a talk in Romanian, I didn't cough once but definitely not my best effort. On the plumbing front, our toilet is leaking, which will most likely need a new bathroom floor. The backyard spigot was jealous of all the attention and leaked even more than the toilet. We started a carport/solar panel structure that had Ernst and I completely disagreeing on HOW HIGH we were going to make it (I wanted sensible, he wanted close to the moon. I missed a bunch of work because of being sick and then ended the month proctoring an eventful California Bar Exam. So much drama, and that's not including the total weirdness of people taking the bar exam in surgical masks! Is it proper etiquette to ask "Hey, is that mask for your protection or mine?"
Those were the highlights of February 2020. The weather was glorious, as it often is when one is sick, but glorious in a way that screams "we need rain, please skies, drop some rain because I don't want to water the yard with double pink eye." We got a drizzle the evening of February 29th, which was hopefully a glimpse of a wetter March? We are only one day into this clean new month, and I'm liking it already. A friend asked me to sew up a little project for her niece, and it was the most productive thing I've done in weeks and weeks. I'm getting jazzed about when the real spring hits, excited about some upcoming trips we have planned (Chicago's in there again) and just getting back to feeling good again. March, let's do this!
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| A rice sock holder and two Bag Buddies. Yes, I did something besides cough and hack! |
