I Am Thankful For...

...the fact that so far I've managed to keep my Thanksgiving dinner down.
This is in no way intended as a slight on the quality of the dinner, which was excellent - thanks again to my hosts for having me over - but rather a reference to the fact that I've been ill.
It started Tuesday night when I went to bed. I felt fine (for a given Jon-specific value of "fine," at any rate), but as I was lying there I started getting progessively more achey, and I started feeling kind of jittery and shaky.
When I got up Wednesday morning I felt, frankly, like I was hungover, which was annoying, as it's unfair to have a hangover without having had any fun the night before. Tired, queasy, sore, and a mild headache.
Things only got worse, particularly in the queasiness department, as the day progressed. At first I thought that maybe I just hadn't eaten enough on Tuesday, as I usually regret it the next day if I don't eat much, but it soon became apparent that something else was going on.
I figured that I needed to eat something, though, just in case. I checked out the vending machine, and found that the only thing that didn't seem utterly repulsive was Gummi Bears, so I bought a bag and managed to choke those down.
At lunch time I walked over to the cafe next door and the smell of food cooking was an assault on my senses that nearly made me vomit on the spot. I bought an energy drink and a cereal bar, which I couldn't eat because it might as well have been made of toxic waste for as palatable I found it. Two or three bites were all I could manage.
As we were closing early and it was already a ghost town, I asked my boss if she minded if I knocked off a little earlier, and headed home.
Once I got home I found myself in what had been a familiar position back in my drinking days: kneeling over the toilet.
There wasn't much in my stomach to throw up beyond Vitamin Water and what remained of the cereal bar.
I left it up to Scott as to whether he wanted to come over and risk catching whatever was wrong with me. He opted to take a chance, so I shared with him the pain that is Troll 2, a pain that would be utterly unbearable without the Riff Trax component.
After that we watched the Riff Trax edition of Pirates of the Carribean and the original Carnival of Souls.
Along the way I managed to choke down a couple of the cookies Scott had brought, and made the mistake of trying to eat some saltines. That proved to be more of an ordeal than I could bear.
Scott left a little after 8, and I went straight to bed.
I woke up sometime around 11:30, and, feeling a bit better, decided to get up so that I could disinfect my contacts and put them in for the night. I decided to try eating some toast. It took me 15 minutes to eat most of one slice, and ten minutes later I found myself doubled over and regretting that mistake.
I went back to bed and woke up sometime after 3, making a mad dash to the bathroom so that I could engage in some dry heave action.
I was up again at 5, at which point, feeling weak with hunger, I ate some mandarin oranges in gelatin, which never tried making their way back out the way they came in.
When I got up a bit after 9, I felt slightly better and managed to eat and keep down an apple, followed later by some Wheat Thins. Later in the day I took a two hour nap, and then finally showered and dressed and headed out for dinner.
I ate a fair amount, and managed to keep it all down, but I have to say that the food was sitting in my stomach like a rock.
I didn't want to stay too long after dinner for fear of unpleasantness.
I seem to have actually digested it at this point, and almost feel normal, so that's a good sign, I guess.
I'm reasonably certain that yesterday marked the first time I've thrown up since I quit drinking.
Actually, after I quit drinking, it seemed like my immune system turned into a total badass, as there have been very few occasions since then upon which I've actually caught anything.
Working in the NOC at AOL was like being inside of an incubator; I was constantly surrounded by sick people and the carriers of kid germs. Seriously, it was like being trapped inside an area quarantined by the CDC, but I never got sick.
Normally at the first hint of sickness mega-dosing on Vitamic C and getting plenty of rest proved to be enough to fight off any illness, but I've been sick more times this year than I ever was in all the years since I quit drinking. Maybe now that I'm out of the "hot zone" of the NOC my immune system has gotten out of shape.
In any case, I hope everyone had a better Thanksgiving than I did, and good luck to those of you brave/crazy enough to venture out into the world on Black Friday.