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Uggghhhhhhh

December 14, 2022 Luther M. Siler

I was sick as fuck yesterday, and called in to work at about 3:30 in the morning and then slept for damn near the entire day. I called in for today last night, not feeling much better, and then– miracle of miracles– they called a snow day, not because it was snowing but because apparently so many of our bus drivers are sick that the whole system has broken down, and there’s already another one tomorrow, although this one is synchronous so I get to spend all day in Meets waiting for kids who will not show up. At least I’m feeling better? Sure.

Even money on whether there’s school Friday, or whether any of the kids show up if there is.

In which I’m still alive

December 9, 2021 Luther M. Siler

I managed to make it back to work today for the first time since, well, last Thursday, and the first two adults to lay eyes on me both told me to take my ass back home again. I failed to take that advice; one of the most confounding things about this recent bout of being sick is that it’s consistently over by noon each day, only to resurge again the next morning, and I figured that since I made it to work without throwing up I could probably make it through the day.

Correct, as it turns out, and I know you all finished that last paragraph thinking “of course he didn’t,” because that’s how these posts almost always go. But no! I not only made it through the day, it was a pretty decent day, all told. I will likely do a Math Teacher Statistics Nerd post about my NWEA scores as soon as the last couple show up for me tomorrow; I have tested all but four of my students, and as none of the four have been to school at any point in the last two weeks I strongly suspect they’re not going to be in tomorrow, which is the last Friday of the semester and the end of the testing window. I want to wait until I have all the numbers I’m going to get before I start geeking out about them, but the early version is this: the good numbers appear to have held or in some cases actually gotten better, with my first and second hour doing particularly well.

… and I’ve spent twenty minutes staring at the screen and idly websurfing, so I guess I’ve said what I have to say for tonight? We’ll see if I make it through tomorrow. I’d like yesterday to have been my last sick day of 2021 but who the hell knows.

It’s not a toomah

March 15, 2020March 18, 2020 Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Last night was miserable– hacking and coughing and snotting all night, and when I wasn’t keeping myself and my wife up the Great Old One was singing us the song of her people– and when I got up my wife insisted that I go to urgent care before this bullshit moves into my lungs. I don’t have the coronavirus, I swear— and the main reason I’ve been avoiding seeing a doctor is that I don’t want to get the coronavirus and I hear there are sick people in doctors’ offices. But enough is goddamned enough at this point.

Turns out my local urgent care lets you videoconference with a doctor, which is not a thing that I would have thought would be a thing. I took my own vitals and reported my symptoms and the doctor agreed with me that, yes, given the timing and the symptoms it was highly likely to be a really inconvenient case of sinusitis or something similar and agreed to prescribe a Z-pack for me. Super! Here’s my pharmacy information; I’ll go pick my drugs up in an hour or so.

Fast forward ten minutes, and my wife points out that my usual pharmacy is closed on Sundays.

Shit.

Blah blah blah lots of phone calls and sucking it up and swinging by the actual urgent care facility and it turns out that the only way to get the scrip switched to a pharmacy that is actually open today is to go through the entire online appointment process and pay for a second visit, which, yay for first world and middle-class privilege, because I can afford to do that, and my health savings account will reimburse me anyway so, really, who cares. So I’m waiting again; the first time I was in and out faster than I would have been for an actual doctor, but this time I started off with fifteen people ahead of me to see the doctor and I swear the number just jumped from eight to nine. Which is the wrong direction. But whatever, I don’t have anything else to do right now, and I figure getting started on antibiotics tonight rather than tomorrow is probably worth the $60 and however much longer it takes to wait.

I look forward to being healthy-ish for a day or two before I actually catch the Rona. I know I’m gonna get it, the only question is how long I can avoid it.

Whee!

(EDIT: Two hours later, and I’d been waiting for a bit when I wrote this, I’m still waiting. Now, granted, I’m not in a room with other sick people. I’m in my office watching Nioh 2 videos. But still. Graaaaah.)

The gift that keeps on giving

August 16, 2017August 16, 2017 Luther M. Siler1 Comment

how-get-rid-cold-flu — WHO THE HELL EATS ORANGES LIKE THIS?

One of the lesser benefits of not being a classroom teacher any longer is that I’ve gone from missing at least a day a month due to illness to almost never getting sick. In fact, other than an occasional one-day thing, I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely ill, and I’ve never taken a sick day at my current job. Not once.

I have a motherfucker of a summer cold right now, is what I’m saying. I spent most of last night too tired to get out of bed and take some medicine but also almost entirely unable to breathe, sniffled and sneezed my way through work all day, got home from work and took some cold medicine and went directly to my son’s parent-teacher night. I may have been hallucinating for part of it. I’m pretty sure I picked up the boy from my parents’ place afterwards because I think I’m at home and he’s sitting over there, but hell if I remember it.

All that said: I will announce a release date for Tales from the Benevolence Archives on Friday if it kills me. That’s it. No more fucking around. It’s coming.

Assuming I don’t die.

Some more thoughts on the trip

March 25, 2017 Luther M. Siler3 Comments

553d0f_80d94846fdff426f85ed2a6551229b72~mv2.png_256.png I promise I’ll stop talking about this soon, if only so that I can start griping about how bad Iron Fist is, but since the last couple of days have been one-sentence posts and at least part of the reason for this blog is so that I can remember my own life I’m gonna write about it a bit more.

There may or may not be a post coming about institutional sexism in the furniture business, mostly depending on what kind of a mood I’m in tomorrow. Because… man. Wow.
I got horrifyingly sick Thursday morning and had to be carted back to the hotel from the vendor meetings; I threw up a few times as well as a few other digestive horrors and spent the rest of the day in bed. A few hours later, my roommate was also brought back to the room sick as hell, but with entirely different symptoms. Trying to navigate around eating enough that I wasn’t passing out with the mix of diarrhea and painful gas that I was experiencing on Friday while navigating through airports and riding on planes is not an experience I care to ever repeat.
About 10% of the people on the trip went down on Thursday; my roommate and I were far from the only ones. Curiously, fully half of the ones I know about were also from Indiana. Which is weird.
But back to the plane thing: I didn’t mind finding out that my last flight of the trip was delayed by half an hour, because we had a 40-minute layover and that seemed a bit tight. An hour and ten minutes, I figured, gave me enough time to grab something to eat so that I had a meal between noon and getting back home at eleven. So you can imagine how pissed and horrified I was when I checked my phone while I was eating and discovered that my flight wasn’t fucking delayed any more. As in they moved the departure time back and then moved it back forward again. I was in the B terminal when I discovered this. My gate was C24. They counted up. I was sweaty, completely out of breath, and violently pissed off by the time I got to my gate, and they were paging me over the intercom.
The fact that a sweaty, pissed-off fat man who didn’t have time to go to the bathroom after a meal and has been fighting digestive problems all day is literally the last person on earth you want to be sitting next to on a plane is not going to stop me from bitching about my seatmate tomorrow.
In general I didn’t like Denver very much– no one should live in a place where the air gives you diarrhea– but at this time I’m going to do the reasonable thing and not blame the city for it. I was on the north side and pretty much confined to the hotel, the store, and the highway between. That part of town is full of factories, warehouses and weed dispensaries with varying degrees of unclever names and it’s filthy and brown. I’m sure there are parts of Denver that are cool and fun. I didn’t see any of them. But I’m sure they’re there somewhere.
For the record, I support marijuana legalization but generally marijuana culture annoys the piss out of me.
The conference itself was well worth the time, though. As a teacher I’m not used to that, which I’ve said before– professional development is supposed to be either insulting or worthless or both. This was a good use of both my time and the company’s money, which I find amazing. I didn’t like the crippling illness part or being away from my family for a week but other than that it was all good. I even met some nice people! That doesn’t happen often.