Category: Retirement

sick

whbeebe

I was very physically ill on Saturday. I’m writing about it here because this is after all my personal web log, where it’s “an official record of events.” I find monetization of web logging abhorrent. If you want to write on the web, there are so many better avenues. Be advised that what follows is very graphic about the physical manifestations of my illness.

I am blessed with great health, far better than many. I am on occasion ill, with occasion being measured in years between incidents (so far in my life, but going forward, who knows?). Except for yesterday.

Yesterday around 2 in the afternoon I began to experience vertigo. Over the course of 30 minutes it went from mild to severe, where I could barely stand erect long enough to move from the T.V. room back to my bedroom. This was the same intensity of vertigo I experienced in September 2019. That period of vertigo was so intense that I went into a local hospital and spent the night for observation as well as some rather strong medications to bring it under control. This time I didn’t want another trip and stay. Instead I was trying to perform the exercises with my head to bring the vertigo under control. Those exercises are supposed to calm the inner ear, which when it goes wonky is how you wind up so dizzy.

That didn’t work. Instead it made me even more nauseous to the point I stumbled into the bathroom and threw up. And I mean full ballistic vomiting. I stayed over the commode until it was just dry heaves, washed out my mouth and then stumbled back into the bed. That unfortunately wasn’t the end of it. Over the next hour I went back in three more times for three more sessions. After the last session my body told my mind it was finished with my stomach. That’s when the G.I. tract decided it wanted to chime in, so my next visit was for diarrhea. Fortunately that was only one trip, but once was enough. By the time I was completely finished with my bathroom trips I was dripping cold sweat and worn out. I went back to bed and slept solidly for three hours.

By the time I woke up the nausea was pretty much gone. I drank a fair amount of water to avoid dehydration, but I wasn’t hungry so I ate nothing. I went back to bed later that evening and unfortunately woke up around 4 am this morning.

A lot of folks at this point are probably thinking “COVID!” I almost thought that as well, except it has all the earmarks of food poisoning. The only question is by what. I sure didn’t eat anything from outside of the home yesterday. And considering how quickly it came upon me, and how quickly it subsided, along with the symptoms, leads me to believe in food poisoning. But none of the typical vectors of food poisoning in the home came up. For example I can’t stand mayonnaise, or other types of condiments, and thus don’t eat those. Everything I ate that morning was either cooked or heated except for some fruit I had later in the day, and it was washed as usual. Right now, no clues.

This morning I’m mostly back to normal. There is some residual tiredness, and a very minor headache on the right side of my head around the temple, but it’s nearly gone now. No nausea to be sure. Just a very intense period of illness for half-a-day yesterday.

I just wish I knew what happened to me.

Update

I took the iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test at home. I tested negative.

on stress and stress dreams

whbeebe1 Comment

I have had my share of stressful situations going back to late high school, through college, and on into marriage and fatherhood. We all have, either serially or stresses piling up at a point in time. You do the best you can and all things do pass. That’s not to say such situations don’t leave their mark. They have with me and I certainly won’t forget many of them.

It’s how my subconscious deals with stress that I find interesting, especially when I sleep. Dreaming does take place, but it’s what you remember that you try to decipher when you wake up. Over time I’ve come to place my stress dreams into two categories, the school stress dream and the travel stress dream.

The school stress dream goes back to when I was in school. The dream was generally pretty much the same; I’m going to a class I haven’t attended the entire semester and it’s the final exam. Or I have to turn in a project (I’m an engineer by training and profession). I’d get those types of dreams at the end of every semester I was in school, especially in college. I really had final papers and final projects and final exams to take, which was the source of the stress. I did well, but the imp in the back of my mind loved to torment me in my sleep with imaginary courses I was surely going to fail. To make it even more interesting, my dream schools were unknown to me, as were the professors and any other individuals in my dreams.

That stress dream evolved into the you’re-still-in-school stress dream. Long after my children had gone off to college, I would get those dreams where I was still attending classes, I’d never married, had a family, or gotten a job. In fact (horror of horrors) I was still an undergraduate. Once or twice I literally had to fight my way back into wakefulness, telling myself who I really was and what I had accomplished. Those dreams disappeared a few years before I retired, and my sleep has been reasonably peaceful. Or if I’ve had them they haven’t been vivid enough for me to remember after waking.

Recently I’ve had several of what I now call travel stress dreams. In those dreams I’m still employed and I’m still traveling. The dream has me at an unknown airport with a lot of luggage. That large amount of luggage is interesting as I traveled light, just one checked bag and my carry-on, even if traveling overseas. At some point in the dream I literally turn around and all of my luggage has disappeared. That’s when my dream panic sets in. What happened to all my luggage and all my possessions in that luggage? So I spend an unknown amount of time looking for my luggage, until I realize I’m home in bed and I wake up.

I have no clue what any of that means. The last time I actually traveled on business was in June 2016, and that was to Kansas City, Kansas. Every single trip I made, either within the continental US or overseas to Japan and South Korea, were totally without incident. I went, I worked, and then I came home. Wait a bit, then repeat. And in all that time I never remembered travel related stress dreams where I lost my luggage.

Although I’m certainly concerned about current US and world events, and the COVID pandemic has certainly applied a lot of pressure, I have no idea what is triggering these new stress dreams, or why they’ve waited until recently to manifest themselves. I was stress dream free as it were from before my retirement until recently.

I don’t believe I’ll ever figure out the triggers for these travel stress dreams, or what they mean. I never did figure out the school stress dreams except to believe they were stress related and my subconscious mind expressed that stress with what my conscious mind knew was vitally important at a particular point in my life. Perhaps it’s a safety valve of sorts. I don’t know. But they are interesting when I remember them.