fever

I've been down for the count these past few days, sporting a fever of, at its peak, 101.8, alternating between the chills and the sweats, overcome with head aches and body aches and painfully tingly skin and scalp and eyes. I was trying to explain the skin thing to my mom this afternoon and it sounded like she thought I was being weird, but this skin thing is something that's always gone hand in hand with a fever, at least for me, and I guess I'd assumed everyone else shared this experience too. Do you?

This is the first time I've had a fever in years, I think. Colds, yes. Hangovers, yes. Aches and pains, yes. But no fever, and no tingly skin. It's been a weird couple of days, holed up in my little apartment, shades drawn so as to avoid direct sunlight in my southwest facing living room.

One nice thing about the last couple days is that I rediscovered how nice a hot bath can be, especially one involving Burt's Bees Apricot Baby Oil or alternatively, an odd fizzy lavender thing that my mom gave me awhile back, in the form of a lion's face and hiding a toy deer at its center. The lavender fizziness made for a lovely bath, but I'm not sure what to do with the toy deer, other than leave it where it is, on the windowsill in the bathroom.

Still, it was a relief to wake up this morning to a normal temperature, and to feel the inclination to eat something, and to, you know, maybe start joining the outside world again. I went for a walk around the block, and I went to the grocery store, and I came home. That was enough of the outside world for today.