Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013 — My plan to ring in the New Year by operating Straight Key Night last night were torn asunder by the arrival early New Year’s Eve morning of an extremely nasty virus that woke me from sleep about 5 a.m.
The warning was one of those “all hands on deck” ones where you know its gonna be bad — and it was. I was able to suppress the need to vomit until I was just inside the bathroom; from there all hell broke loose.
My wife works in healthcare, and she has been telling me about this virus and how awful it is. She had a run-in with it late last week, and none of us had a run-in with it — until yesterday morning. Accompanying the vomiting (of course) was diarrhea, requiring one to really be prepared. But after this spell, which was of short duration, I cleaned up and returned to bed, taking a small trash can with me “just in case.”
“Just in case” arrived about 7:45 a.m. If I thought the first round was awful, this next one went off the “Holy Shit! I’m Sick!” scale. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll only add that my mistake was just bringing to bed a single bucket.
After I came downstairs and cleaned up, I hit the couch, which is much closer to the bathroom should I need to go again. I only left the couch twice the entire day. Before heading to bed I did listen for a few moments on 80 CW and copied a SKN QSO. One of the gents in the QSO was a ham I knew, too, how lucky is that? But my head and stomach were not willing to copy much CW, so off to bed I went.
This morning, I’m eating a slice of bread (carefully) with some Gatorade, all the while monitoring Mr. Tum Tum for signs of distress. So far, so good. I ate some crackers and Gatorade late last night, and they fared well, so perhaps I can actually eat something I like before the end of the day. Who knows, if I get feeling better I might fire up the Heathkit HW-16 and jump into the SKN frey. Here’s hoping.