Weekend Plans Post: On Durians and Getting Sick
My boss’s brother just got back from Singapore and brought everybody some durian cookies. They were these.
Durian, if you don’t know, is one of those foods that people feel strongly about. You know the people who tell you that they hate olives? Others that olives are the best food ever? Well, durian is like that. Some people say that the flesh of the fruit smells sweet, almost cloyingly so, and tastes rich and savory and nutty. “King of the Fruits!”, they call it.
I did a little bit of research. The flesh of the durian isn’t like a cantaloupe, like I assumed it would be, but like an avocado. Not fibrous but creamy… almost spreadable. Whip it up and put it into a creampuff. Sandwich it between two cookies! In my research, I also saw that the durian was banned from public transport in Singapore. The smell, you see, sticks around. Some people don’t mind the smell. Some people demand that a law be passed.
I tasted the durian cookie and thought it tasted like an onion foot. It took hours for the taste to leave my mouth. I got a chili dog from 7-11 and it didn’t help. Ugh. This is why I don’t try new things.
In revenge, we made jokes about the coronavirus. “Does your tongue feel extra large today? Are you, like, aware of it in your mouth? Can you crack your knuckles or do they get just THIS close to cracking?” You know, stuff like that. Because, seriously, the durian cookies were bad. I wanted to, to use the term popular in competitive eating circles, “have a reversal”.
And that and the coronavirus jokes got me to remembering the time I had influenza in the first or second year of my marriage.
Now, I had a number of illnesses as a child that got called “the flu”. You barf for a couple of days, you have some bathroom problems for a day, then you’re back in the game. “What was wrong?” “Oh, I had the flu.”
I didn’t have the flu. I had a stomach bug and it went through my system.
In the first or second year of my marriage with Maribou, we had Influenza. This stuff was BAD. We lived in a fever state between staggering to the bathroom and staggering back to bed and negotiating whether one of us had the strength to stagger to the fridge that was 12 feet away and bring back some Gatorade or cans of Ensure to ingest some fluids that would soon be evacuated. Fever dreams. Moaning. Staggering back to the bathroom. Staggering back to bed. FOR A WEEK.
And then we were fine. “Let us never speak again of some of the compromises we made.” “Well, until I need to post about it in a couple of decades.”
And all that to say: I got my flu shot. Please: Get your flu shot.
This weekend will be spent not being sick (I hope).
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “IMG_4068” by alicia.chia@ymail.com. Used under creative commons license.)
1. the last time I had influenza, it was like 25 years ago. I was (relatively) young and stupid, and was “I don’t need no stinkin’ flu shot!”
I wound up sick for at least a month, it turned into asthmatic bronchitis, I had to get a prednisone shot in my butt and go on an theophylline inhaler so I didn’t cough myself to pieces and so I could get enough air into my lungs. The theophylline made me shake like a Chihuahua that had drunk several espressos.
The next year, I started getting the flu shot. Knock on wood, I’ve managed to avoid it since then, even in the years when the shot’s not a perfect match for the strain going around (I did have two small respiratory things last year, one of which *might* have been a mild case of the flu-that-wasn’t-in-the-shot, but it wasn’t any worse than a bad cold, so).
2. Now that I am older and have some chronic stuff (asthma, very likely brought on by that bout of bronchitis), I would get to jump towards the start of the line in years when there’s less vaccine available and I….don’t really have a problem with that. Oh, I’d let the nurse who takes care of the elderly go ahead of me, or the guy fighting cancer….but I’ve never had a problem finding a source for vaccine here, so it’s not an issue.
This weekend is a holding pattern; I may or may not have some slightly unsettling medical testing next week. Something happened last week that was unexpected, and while it’s very likely it’s within the realm of normal bodily variation, there is a tiny probability it could be something very bad. I think I will be trying to find many distractions (even work, possibly) this weekend so I don’t imagine a situation of my doctor walking into the room, taking a deep breath, and going “Well….” and then I have to figure out how to fit surgery and recovery time into my too-packed schedule.
As I said earlier, I am really ready for a couple months of nothing eventful happening whatsoever. I really hope (and expect) the outcome of this is the doctor coming and going “Yeah, bodies are weird and they scare us some times” but also I have enough of a morbid imagination to think of the other options…
(My more rational brain goes, “You’re far too well to have the worst possibility” but the goblin part is going “yes, but you’ve also heard stories of people who were fine right up until the day they dropped dead of cancer”)Report
Yeah, when I started taking my flu shot, it wasn’t because of a moment of clarity brought about by illness, it was something as simple as working for a company that had the benefit of Free Flu Shots In The Conference Room. I wandered in, got stuck, then not an hour later turned ashen and had to go home and sleep for 16 hours because the first flu shot can sometimes do that sort of thing.
GOOD LUCK WITH THE DOCTOR THING.
I know that last year sucked. I hope that this visit has the doctor explaining “well, as we all know, Gen X is getting older… that has some good things that go with it, and it also has this thing going on for you. Which is normal for Gen X at this point. We recommend heated blankets and a tincture of laudanum before bed.”Report
well, it’s also not out of the realm of possibility she will go “You know? What happened to you is sometimes the result of someone who has been under a lot of stress for a while. That’s our best explanation here. If you have any problems in the future don’t hesitate to call but I doubt you will”Report
Ditto what Jaybird said. Good luck with the doctor thing.Report
Every doctor I’ve talked to as an adult has told me when asked, “There’s no such thing as a 24-hour stomach bug. Almost certainly you had a mild case of food poisoning, which is much more common than we’d like to believe.”
As part of the ongoing sinusitis/bronchitis/back cramps adventure, I learned that Kaiser’s computers refuse to let the docs prescribe muscle relaxants for the cramps because I’m too old. As if I weren’t already feeling bad enough…Report
This is something that I didn’t know. I will ask my doctor this. (I seem to recall bugs jumping around classrooms, though. Getting people at work. I dunno if they coincided with chicken nuggets day…)
Good luck with the s/b/bc thing. That sucks. (And I know that anything I think might help is stuff you’ve already thought of, dismissed, tried, or have already incorporated.)Report
What about Norovirus? I vividly remember catching Norovirus after one of my parents had had it over Christmas break in like 2006 or 2007. Spent a day throwing up (I never believed projectile vomiting was a thing until I had Norovirus), spent the next day unable to stay awake for more than 15 minutes at a time.
A couple days later I was fine.
I’ve had food poisoning, it’s a lot less severe for me than that was. Or maybe I never got bad food poisoning? I don’t know.Report
I’ve been sick several times with a stomach type illness only to find out later a child at an event had been sick with it. Those are brutal and not food poisoning.Report
Not that I know, but maybe the bug takes a while to start and a while to ebb, but the actual “stomach effects” last only about 24 hours.Report
I turned 49 yesterday, so I got that going for me. We spent the last weekend out of town on the coast, catching the one sunny day in a PNW winter. Which was nice. Anyway, my son is out from Philly and is talking about how he is moving to NYC in the next few months. I just listen.Report
Happy Birthday AaronReport
OH, forgot to add, I add the “flu” once when I was in college. It laid me out for around 3-4 days, so I read The Lords of Discipline. I have never gotten a flu shot though.Report
Happy birthday! Get a flu shot.Report
My pal and vino consigliere has friends’n’family passes from one of his clients for the pre-opening a new Burger Joint in NOVA… fancy truffle aioli burgers n’such. With wine. Pretentious food. So we’re doing that.
Remember to take your elderberry syrup this flu season.Report
…is elderberry syrup a thing?Report
It is a thing.Report
“One study of 60 people with influenza found that those who took 15 ml of elderberry syrup four times per dayshowed symptom improvement in two to four days, while the control group took seven to eight days to improve”
FOUR TIMES A DAY
Ain’t nobody got time for that!Report
…and its delicious.
Think of it as a tool in your arsenal when you get the flu after the flu-shot because the strain(s) they built the shots for isn’t the strain running through Boulder.
15 ml is 1 TBSP which is the typical daily does pre-flu. If you are sick in bed, then taking 3 more TBSP in a day to trade 3-4 of delerium is fricking awesome!Report
Only if your mother is a hamster.Report
under no circumstances should you do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OSCe5c3rJYReport
Oh, goodness. Oh my goodness.Report
It’s gonna take, like, an hour to uncurl my lip.Report
“All the yard smells like shit.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!Report
Man, I love The Hydraulic Press Channel. (I had not seen that one)Report
While I was active duty, flu shots were mandatory. After I got out, I stopped getting them because nobody was the boss of me. Last year I got one, and thanks to this reminder, I’ll go get one today.
Nothing big planned this weekend. Got half the couch delivered this week (there was a fit problem with the other half) so I can continue turning what was the guest room into a library, and maybe strongly encourage oldest boy to continue cleaning his room. There’s a 90% probability that I’ll go in there and take care of a couple of things regardless, but we’ll see.Report
I remember when I was living with my parents for a year after law school, I got Durian in Chinatown after a job interview or something. My parents told me to put it in the garage. It tasted good though.Report
This is where it helps to be Jewish; if there’s something you don’t want to try, just insist it’s not kosher.Report
“I might be allergic, I am to (thing that is related to this thing)” tends to work for me. At least, with my friends, because they know I have some FREAKY allergies.Report
Without getting into religion, I was going to ask “but ain’t fruit kosher?” but then I remembered what durian smells like.Report
I’ve never been formally diagnosed with the flu. However, looking back, I can see times in my life where I got what was probably the flu. Maybe it didn’t last a whole week, but it was hard to even walk to the fridge or the faucet to get water. But I was young and hale (except for having the flu), so I survived unscathed.
Now I get a flu shot every year, even though I usually have a tough time of it for a day or two after getting the shot. [ETA: And I haven’t had the flu since I’ve been getting shots. Knock on wood.]Report