Snoqualmie

Ab-sense.

The last day that I can really remember, in a normal-brain-functions kind of way, is Tuesday. I haven't been on a single recreational intoxicant between then and now. This isn't fair.

I got knocked flat on Wednesday by what I insist on calling the plague. It may have been the flu; it may have been the head cold from hell; it may have been an exotic virus brought to this continent by achy, congested monkeys. I don't know and it probably doesn't matter. It dragged me home from work midday because I couldn't breathe or focus or stay awake, and I slept through the afternoon and the next day and half of Friday without getting out of bed for much of anything except the bathroom. Genius, Dianna. Way to make yourself, by the time Friday evening rolls around, not merely congested and achy and exhausted and feverish, but congested and achy and exhausted and feverish and dehydrated and dizzy and out of blood sugar. (I discovered this in the health and beauty aisle of Fred Meyer, where I was supposedly buying NyQuil but actually wobbling drunkenly with my mouth open and trying to figure out what I was doing there.) Which meant that between Friday night and this morning I again didn't get out of bed, this time because I couldn't without feeling like I was going to hit the floor.

When one's bedroom is on the second floor of a house with steep and treacherous stairs, and the kitchen and all sources of running water are on the first floor, and one needs to be eating and drinking in order to stop being dizzy and queasy, well, for a neat demonstration of the cognitive problem here, it didn't occur to me until just this moment that I could have brought more than one cup of water or one serving of food up to my room at a time. I can't even think how many unpleasant trips I could have saved myself.

Last night my (largely absent when needed as nurses) roommates came home to a small, wobbly-lettered note on the dining room table. "Dear roommates," it said, "I am too sick for the grocery store and I am running out of things that I need to survive." It went on to beg for orange juice and pasta and NyQuil, liquid, because the little soft gelcaps hurt too much to swallow. It didn't stop my renting roommate from coming home and throwing a serious hell of a drunken party downstairs (though, to be fair, neither did the serious hell of a party stop me from falling back into my foggy congested sleep), but it did prompt my owning roommate to run out this morning and get me some OJ. He was back in miraculous short order with two little bottles of Minute Maid, which had me scratching my head and wondering how he'd done it so quickly and why not one big bottle?

See, because we have a quickie mart on the next block up, whereas the actual supermarkets are a mile or more away. And quickie marts are open all the time and sell things that people need desperately at arbitrary times, like NyQuil and pasta and little bottles of orange juice. And when it was 30 degrees on Friday night and I was woozy and miserable, I could have gotten everything I needed and been home in the time it took me to wait for the train to the totally unnecessary actual market, if, if, I had remembered the damn quickie mart existed.

Clever virus. Knock out the victim's brain first, so it can't figure out how to get the tools to fight you. I see how this works.