Feeling awful

One thing I noticed about being sick is that the magnitude of illness sort of increases the longer you are on a healthy stretch. I'm not talking about the likes of common cold where the only inconvenience is a runny nose or minor diarrhea. Imagine something that really makes it very difficult for you to think straight or function properly or serious illnesses that warrants hospitalization.

I'm normally a pretty healthy person, small niggling common colds and migraines notwithstanding, rarely sick to the point of giving control to the immune system to wage their own war against the offending invaders and losing motivation for all else.

"What's this 'flu' crap you've been talking about, Lieutenant?"

Perhaps it's due large to growing up in an environment where exposure to germs is a daily thing, especially from the activities that I take part in the afternoons such as waging imaginary spy wars by moving from point to point via climbing up and down drains, get cuts and bruisers along the way from climbing trees as well playing football barefooted in the rain.

Despite the environment at home were ultra-clean considering both my parents being clean maniacs - you can't keep a piece of half used paper on the table alone for a while without it ending up in the bin the next time father passes by - it is not unusual to come home in soiled shorts and dirty slippers with caked sand around the body. Strange enough that my parents never complained (much) about coming home looking like I rolled around in a dumpster, only if I stepped into the house without first cleaning up.

That includes pig snot.

There's some sort of line drawn between being 'sick' and being 'a phony' by my parents when it comes to illness - if you brain can function as normal, it's school as usual or have the entire day being viewed as a wuss. That includes the likes of the sniffles, sprained ankles and other physical issues that does not affect the ability to think. I was not allowed to go to school during those infectious disease periods though - mumps and chicken pox, which always results in fever, achy limbs, headache and nausea.

So yesterday as well as today's after effect of food poisoning almost floored me as the last major illness I've had was almost five years ago - viral fever - that got me hospitalized for a couple of days, not before enduring five days of really bad aches all over the body, fever and the overall feeling of Apocalypse.  What followed was around a month of recuperation that had me feeling like a total wreck for weeks.

"Do I look like I give a damn about your sticks?"

One exception to the story was almost four years ago when my father was a passer-by involved in a robbery at a local tuckshop, causing him to lose a great deal of blood and passing out before reaching the hospital. My brother was frantic when he sent him to the hospital, everybody was in panic mode. Mother must have felt like her world was being turned upside down again less than ten years after Denis died - could not imagine how it felt to be cleaning the car porch of blood dripping from the open wounds of my father.

All in all, thank goodness that this is just a bout of mild food poisoning that did not cause any complications - sufficed to say mother won't know about it until later.

That said, no more Singapore meehoon from that shop ever again.

Except in this most awesome of all forms.
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