Tyrannosaurus flu

I've always been a pretty healthy guy. I've never missed a day of work due to illness in my career. I work out, eat well, and have a decent immune system. I'll come down with the common cold maybe every year, but nobody ever notices. I just work out, drink lots of OJ, and keep my adrenaline pumping, and I fight it off pretty well. But I came down with something over the weekend that has just about floored me...

I started to feel the problem late Friday and early Saturday. Congestion, sore throat, the whole bit. The first sign of an issue was that I was working a youth retreat, leading a group of twelve junior high boys. That, my friends, is a massive, mobile petri dish for disease. The only time germs are threatened among that group is when they impishly decide to play with fire.

So that group didn't help, but it seems like I contracted whatever I have now shortly before the weekend started. Right now, I'm at home, having made it until 1pm before I had to call it a day at work. So, thus, I blog about my illness...

I slogged through yesterday at a pretty pathetic pace. But I didn't have to work very much because I worked a lot on Sunday, so I came in late and left a little after 4pm. Today, I felt a little better, but got several reports from coworkers and other affiliates that there had been a few cases of swine flu at the office and at our programs. Awesome. Here I was, thinking that I just had a cold and yelled myself hoarse all weekend... turns out, I might have be piggy sick.

I remember thinking to myself, There's no way I have swine flu. The image of the pig doesn't do this nightmare justice. I need a bigger animal, like zebra or hippo or gorilla or a big huge nasty dinosaur flu.

I went to one of those "Minute Clinics" in a CVS pharmacy, and asked them to test me for swine flu. They actually told me that no one will test for just swine flu... HUH? Apparently, the medical world's brilliant fix for this epidemic is to just have everyone test for influenze A and B, and if you have A, they just call it swine flu. If you are in a hospital setting, they will do that test, and if you come up positive for flu A, then they'll do a swine flu swab test. Costs too much money to do a swine flu test on everyone who's sick, they told the nurse treating me.

Okay. I don't want to know what they'd do in the case of an ebola outbreak, but let's stick to the facts here...

Just to amuse myself, I asked her if there were any other flus in the animal kingdom that this test wouldn't cover. Her Spanglish wasn't too good, so she just gave me a weird look. The amusement would end with me.

So she tested me for the different flu family members, and I came up with no flu. Her best guess was that I just have a bad cold or upper respiratory infection. Please, my vote is Tyrannosaurus flu.

If it looks like a flu, smells like a flu, sounds like a flu, tastes like a flu, it's a freakin' flu. I've had, consistently, sore and congested throat, nasal congestion, coughing, and a fever. Intermittently, I have had muscle and body aches, headaches, hot and cold flashes, fatigue, and loss of appetite.

Now, that sounds like a flu for most people. For me, the loss of appetite alone could signal impending death. All of those symptoms in me might very well point to Armaggedon.

So I walk out with suggestions of fluids, hot soup, and Motrin for any muscle aches. I'm also going to be researching what might have killed off the dinosaurs. Don't be surprised if I try blast a meteor from outer space into my throat tonight...