I have, according to a good doctor at my chosen clinic, been suffering from what used to be called walking pneumonia for the last five days. Health professionals today call it "atypical" pneumonia.
Real
pneumonia is a lung infection (viral, bacterial, or fungal) that kicks your
ass, fiddles with you a little bit more, and then drags you off to the hospital
in very serious condition. Atypical pneumonia kicks your ass and fiddles with
you. If you don’t pay attention and seek help (antibiotics in my case), you
might also end up in the hospital.
In
personal terms, this stuff is zero fun. I have been achy—even my eyes hurt—and
astoundingly tired. I am, at the same time, filled with gunk and sometimes
lapse into debilitating fits of coughing. Most notably, my brain is not in a
functional state. Yesterday, for example, it took me something like forty
seconds to decide if I should look in the refrigerator or the microwave for a
Coke. My dreams have also been exceptionally weird. And because I have been
splitting my time between napping and wandering around the house (wondering why
I am doing so), I sometimes enter a state of consciousness where I am living in
a mix of dream and real time. The other day, everything in my living room
alternated back and forth between being furniture and houseplants and being a
bleak, war-torn landscape. I guess, if you pressed hard enough, you would need
to call this stuff hallucinating.
To
be sure, this is all interesting, but I would like to get back to feeling
normal again. Maybe I could have a Coke... once I figure out how to find the
refrigerator.
—Mitchell Hegman
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