A carnival of technology

I don’t actually know what my fever was. I didn’t own any kind of thermometer until this evening, at which point my temperature appears to be mostly normal. NOAA tells me the temperature outside, my fancy programmable thermostat that still can’t get this dump below 80 tells me the temperature inside, and body temperatures are for sick people. I don’t get sick.

I got sick. I firmly believe that this is a result of the accident. My immune system is normally strong, like bull, which I attribute to high doses of vitamin C, exercise and a good night’s sleep. I haven’t been buying as much orange juice as normal because it often doesn’t fit in the bag next to all of those stupid TV dinners, I certainly haven’t been exercising, and my stupid broken foot has me sleeping on the couch more often than not. I have a cold. There’s no point in going to a doctor—there’s no cure for the common cold after all—but the difference in available medication for the symptoms has been striking. The last time I had a cold I took some Nyquil and slept it out, but after the Control Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, Nyquil replaced the pseudoephedrine with something useless—phenylalanine or something stupid like that—and it doesn’t work anymore. I have some Sudafed leftover from before it required an anal probe to buy, but it’s expired and I’m not sure it’s working at 100% efficiency. Oddly enough, Vicodin is probably the best thing to take. It’s a pain reliever, fever reducer and cough suppressant, which about covers everything. I guess it’s a good thing that I saved some.

I started getting a headache after Kat and Jon left on Saturday, so, according to WebMD, I still have two or three days of sniffling and sneezing before everything clears my system. This sucks. I took enough cough drops to equate to a couple packs of Newports in menthol, but now the cough has stopped and my nose is running. How did the cold even come to be? What possible advantage is there for a species, if a virus can even be called a living thing, to give someone the sniffles for a week? This sucks.