Post your most recent ILLNESS (in detail)

I came down with a nasty cold a couple days ago. I've been working very hard from home for the past month and the first day I left the house to socialize, I must have picked up a big from one of my dirty friends.

I normally try to attack the cold as soon as it comes on. I load up on tons of vitamin C, eat lots of fatty/spicy foods (pho). This thing came on pretty strong. I couldn't take time off, so I had to work through it. That sucked, especially because my client has to come over to my place for a deadline push. That means no sleep for 2 days, coughing up greenish brown shit, constant nose blowing, ingesting every over-the-counter remedy you can name and religious house cleaning.

Last night, I got a fever and chills for about 2 hours. Luckily that passed quickly.

I literally thought I was going to pass out in front of my client at the computer today. It sucked. Badly.

i genuinely can't remember the last time i was ill and haven't been off work from illness in years.

working alone from home must actually be quite bad for your immune system, not being around common bugs on a daily basis.

I'm going through the same thing! Sinus infection that led to lots of postnasal drip that led to loss of my voice and now a lovely chest cough and fever. Nothing like spitting out thick, viscous yellow phlegm...bah.

Salt water gargling 4 times a day with any respiratory tract infection. Just about the only thing that will genuinely work to clear things. You can do a nasal saline wash also.

I rarely ever get sick but jesus am I a hypochondriac. always imagining I have hip cancer cause I keep my phone in my pocket at all hours

  On 6/15/2012 at 2:07 PM, dr lopez said:

I rarely ever get sick but jesus am I a hypochondriac. always imagining I have hip cancer cause I keep my phone in my pocket at all hours

don't worry, testicle cancer is more likely.

that's certainly crossed my mind many sleepless nights as well. not to mention the stomach problems from keeping the laptop on my stomach in bed.

edit: holy shit my english sucks right now fuck living abroad

Not my most recent, but my most spectacular/dangerous was Lyme disease.

Most of the right side of my torso was red and swollen. lesson learnt; protect yourself from tics.

i had a cough that was brought on by standing near an extractor fan (drinking water periodically stopped it). just felt a bit shit, a few cold symptoms sometimes.. during the winter. no illness since spring.

i smoke, drink and eat what many consider to be an unhealthy diet. don't get any long-lasting illness though, so fuck 'em.

watmm first aid http://forum.watmm.com/topic/72728-first-aid/

I have aids

If you have ebola, you should be alright.

I had a runny nose for a few minutes during my Calculus final and it was bothersome.

the most major one I can remember was food poisoning.

I spent most of the night projectile vomiting, ruining my bed, many of my textbooks and my laptop. I then managed to crawl to the bathroom to shit out what looked like a pinkish sludge of diarrhea and blood. I then began to develop intense feverish symptoms, to the point where if I raised my head for more than ten seconds I would vomit. I laid my head and body onto the cold cooling tiles of the bathroom floor, praying that this was just some sort of fluke. I managed to hoist myself up for another round of projectile vomiting, luckily this time into the toilet. I then somehow (I don't even remember how I did this) managed to shit another round of pink goo into the toilet before collapsing against the side of the bathroom.

At this point I was hovering in and out of consciousness. I yelled for my roommate for help, to call somebody, to drive me to a hospital, anything. I received no response except for the jarring tinnitic silence of the void that was our apartment in the dead autumn heat. I suddenly felt the need to vomit again, but remembering the breathing techniques I had learned to stop vomitus when I had drank one too many, I closed my eyes and could feel nothing but the turning of my stomach, and the clammy cold sweat pouring down my face, my back now sticking to the bathroom tiles. I told myself that I could die, that I didn't have the strength to get out my door, much less drive myself to a hospital. I needed to order my body to stop destroying itself. Nothing but blackness and the gurgling of my loins....breathe in, breathe out...

As I start to feel some success was to be had with the urging to ralph, I suddenly felt the urge to shit again....but much worse than before. It was as if my body had diverted all the vomitus in the mouth and immediately directed it towards the only other orifice it could escape from. This had to be purged from my body at all costs, and my brain could not tell it to stop. The brief instance of panic that accompanied this feeling was just as quickly interrupted by a stream of frothy dark red vomit forcing my jaws open. My body sensed my brain's moment of weakness, and told the bile to surge forth harder and stronger than I had ever experienced. My bathroom and my own body now doused in blood red vomit, I wanted to die. I wanted to cry, how miserable a human being must be to be lying in his own putrified waste, unable to even move his wretched carcass from his filth. At this point I had envied even the weakest of the nursing home population.

But, yet again I knew that my body was redirecting for one more final push out of my anus. I couldn't let this happen. Again, I cannot remember the specific circumstances, but I somehow engaged in a superhuman act of defiance, not only against this debilitating sickness, but against my own dehydrated, confused, and stalling corpus. I'm not shitting all over myself. Not today. Somehow I manage to put all of my strength into my arms, and HEAVE........Goddamn Im not even out of the bathroom yet....HEAVE....As I felt my strength sap itself all the more, I simultaneously experienced the disgusting sensory privilege of having my own sick rub up against my now mostly naked body, as I squirmed and writhed in determined yet pathetic pangs of pain....HEAVE....

I finally made it to the side of my bed. Clambering around hopelessly in the dark, I somehow manage to knock the phone off of my bedside table. It's still charged....holy shit SR4, you might be able to get out of this yet. I vaguely remember trying to mount some sort of victory cry, but it probably came out like a confused, muted whimper, something like the victim in Guinea Pig 2 would make towards the end of her seemingly infinite series of mutilations. I manage to turn the phone on and call 911. Success! The ambulance would be on its way in minutes! But there was a catch. I had to get to the front door to open it.

At this point I had realized my roommate was either not in the apartment, or had drank himself into a comatose stupor. I had to make the journey over to the front of the apartment by myself. This is it, I said to myself, knowing that only the most stubborn bastards ever survive the darkest, most hellish recesses of existence because they are willing to endure despite all of it.....HEAVE......I'm almost into the kitchen...HEAVE...I'm on a Vietnam battlefield. I'm in the middle of D-Day. They've shot my legs off...but they won't get the rest of me. As I use the last of my strength to unlock the front door, I feel my bowels start to give way...the beginnings of those apocalyptic rectal spasms. I collapse as I hear the distant wailing of an ambulance siren.

I wake up in the hospital ER seven hours later. My mouth is thick with the taste of vomit, my mucus has the texture of gritty Jell-O, so thick it couldn't be spit out. Water. I need water. I blindly grab around, still not completely in my senses, until a nurse comes in and tells me about my journey. It has been a while, but AFAIK, I had lost an incredibly large amount of blood and water, and was in some sort of shock when they found me by my front door, half-naked, saturated in the Nicaraguan guerilla-paintstreaks of shit and bloody vomit. I had to stay in the ER for at least 24 hours while they intravenously hydrate me and try to evacuate whatever parts of the virus were left. I wasn't allowed to drink any water for another 10 hours. The nurse said from what information the paramedics learned, there was a chance that I might have died overnight.

Eventually they let me go home. I must have looked completely disoriented, disheveled, smelled worse than a street urchin with an impulsive masturbation disorder. As my girlfriend picked me up, she turned to me, stared at the humiliated wretch before her, and asked what had happened.

Not now, I said. Confused, she eventually nodded and assumed I was too tired to tell the tale. "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." And she was right. Up until now, there wasn't a need to talk about it. I had lived through hell. I had cheated death.

How could you expect another human being to understand the struggle of which you had just undertaken and survived?

I wasn't in the mood for trifling, mundane storytelling. I just wanted a damn Powerade.

*DIsclaimer:The preceding rant is a partially dramatized version of a real event. It really did suck that bad.*

I played my part in the great cold-respiratory infection-bloody bronchitis pandemic of early '12.

I fucked up my arm and can't draw, possibly ever again.

i never get sick, really. for me, a cold is basically sniffling for 2 days.

but i did just go crazy for like 3 months. so tradeoffs i guess?

  On 6/16/2012 at 2:51 AM, aencre said:

I fucked up my arm and can't draw, possibly ever again.

whaaat? Say it ain't so....

does an HIV scare count? because it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life.

  On 6/16/2012 at 1:36 PM, Rubin Farr said:

does an HIV scare count? because it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life.

I don't think scares count. Sorry.

... unless it gave you anxiety induced hives or vomiting or something like that, I guess.

Regardless, that fucking SUCKS! I'm genuinely happy to hear it was only a scare.

I had colon cancer just a little over a year ago in my sigmoid colon. Luckily the surgeons removed it all. I didn't have to get chemo or radiotherapy. Just had my yearly checkup three weeks ago - which is required after something like that, and I'm happy to say that the tests were all clear. No sign of the cancer returning.

Malaria

i've had weird heart palpitations recently. feels like my heart wants to burp. when i listened with a stethoscope while the sensation was occurring, the rhythm seemed normal, so i might be a hypochondriac.

ive had like 3 colds in the past five years, twice when i was visiting vancouver and once when people from vancouver came here to visit. fucking foreign antigens! fuck you vancouver!

  On 6/19/2012 at 2:20 AM, Hoodie said:

i've had weird heart palpitations recently. feels like my heart wants to burp. when i listened with a stethoscope while the sensation was occurring, the rhythm seemed normal, so i might be a hypochondriac.

you should definitely let a doctor listen with a stethoscope just in case