Maybe We Should Go Back

Well that certainly escalated quickly

So... I'm in the hospital.

The day after my positive observation, I got sick. I may or may not have even mentioned this in that entry. I'm aware that when you do a spell, you have to pay a price and it will come back to you and all that, and I figured this was the price of the successful spell. That was fine with me. I wasn't bad sick either, just like sore throat, mild cold, quick recovery, could still go to work. By the weekend I was basically fine. It turned into a cough (as it always does for me) and I had some sinus issues going on, but not a big deal whatsoever. I felt fine. I did start to lose my voice though. As a teacher this is a big pain-in-the-ass problem, but it's happened before, it'll happen again, and you just deal with it as best you can when it does. The voice went in and out Tuesday and Wednesday, but it wasn't that bad.

The first time I felt strange, not bad, just strange was recess on Wednesday. I felt weirdly off, like my body didn't feel normal I guess. It's hard to explain. I just remember standing up from the bench and thinking, I feel weird. I brushed it off. When there was about thirty minutes left in the school day, I put the kids on some work and sat down. I never sit down in a class of students. Bad things happen when teachers sit down. I've learned this the hard way. I had to though. I felt achy. My skin started to feel tender the way it does when I have a fever. My body hurt.

When it was time to tell the kids to pack up I told them, "Listen, I don't know what happened to me in the last 20 minutes, but I am feeling very bad. I may not be here tomorrow." (It was just the usual heads up that they might have a sub.) I did not anticipate having to actually do that, however, so I didn't leave "official" sub plans even though I had extra copies of stuff laying around.

I left school quickly, picked up my daughter and went home. I told the kids to play and went straight to bed. I woke up after the kids had already been put in bed and went in the living room to talk to my husband. I was really bad off by this point and had a 102 fever. I texted our staffing lady and told her what was going on so they could get me a sub. I texted my colleagues and said I was still bringing my son to school in the morning so I would put the work and note together for the sub so they wouldn't have to scramble around doing it for me.

That morning. You guys. That fucking morning. It took literally all I had in me to get to that school to drop my son off and put together that sub plan. People who saw me visibly recoiled in horror. I wore a mask because I could tell I was a beacon of contagion and harbinger of plague. It took about thirty minutes total. I felt like death. I could barely drive home.

I did not move from the bed all day. I was flat out. Total flu symptoms. Every breath hurt. Every time I breathed I had this stabbing pain that went from my right collar bone all the way down my ribcage. I thought it was maybe pleurisy from coughing. I just slept with an ice pack on the back of my neck and tried to break the fever which got as high as 104. I didn't get out of bed again until the following morning because my principal had set this Friday as blackout (it happens when too many people request the same day off- there aren't enough subs, so she will blackout anyone extra from taking the day for PTO.) But a little known fact is that if you have a doctor's note you just have to bring it in and they'll put it as PTO for you anyway.

My husband is off on Fridays so we kept Ethan home too since the school is such a drive. We went to a little urgent care place to be seen and get the note. They tested for Covid and flu but wanted me to go to the hospital ER because the tests were negative and they could do a much larger panel there. Plus my oxygen was really low. I could barely breathe and was breathing in this rhythmic way to a little sing-song phrase I made up in my head because it was the only thing that helped. I could also barely walk by that point so everything took forever.

The hospital put me on oxygen and did all the things they do, you know. My son and husband were there, and I knew it was gonna be a long haul so I asked how long and if they could just leave and come back to get me. The doctor said they were thinking about admitting me. I was like... excuse me? What? Why? He said he was running tests to make sure I wasn't septic, had a blood clot or had pneumonia. Oh, paranoid doctor, I thought, you sweet summer child, I have nothing of the sort. I am just sick with some nasty virus and need to get some rest.

Well... turns out I'm the sweet summer child this time. They did a chest X-ray and cat scan and found pneumonia in both lungs, pretty bad in the right one, which is why every breath felt like I was being stabbed on the right. I still had glimmers of hope of returning home and not staying for the night, but my oxygen wasn't improving fast enough and they told me I had to stay.

This is the first morning I have felt even remotely normal since Wednesday. All day long yesterday they pumped meds into me via the IV and it's doing its thing. I still hurt on the right side but it's not nearly as bad. I can get up to take a piss without feeling like I need to prepare for a journey to Mordor first. I can talk. I can eat. I'll live.

And now I'm just bored.

Stuff like this never happens to me, and I don't know, you guys... if THIS was the price of that spell... well you won't see my ass on a broom anytime in the near future that's for damn sure.