I am drowning again in some respulsive Disease. Unclean! Unclean! Plus also I am 26 and miss my mommy and it is very hard to be a big girl in the big city when you are lying around in Darth Maul boxers and a Mickey Mouse tanktop feeling sorry for yourself.

I will tell you this much, The Disease is throwing my weight loss for a loop. (Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t dare weigh myself because I’m sure there’s at least ten extra pounds of snot involved.) On Friday I went to the walk-in clinic because I was almost literally too ill to move. Those eight blocks took about half an hour, three times as long as normal. It turned out to be a serious, serious lung infection and they kept me there for half the morning while they did emergency X-rays and yelled at me for using Advil to self-treat. Oops. The doctor wanted to hospitalize me and put me on an antibiotic IV, but I balked and he finally gave up and put me on a really, really powerful antibiotic that I have to take four pills a day for a week. I took the first dose after games night on Friday (I figured the two adult beverages I had wouldn’t have any effect because it didn’t say anything on the info insert). Went to bed, slept about nine hours, so far so hoopy. Saturday was when the side effects started to kick in.

Holyshitmotherfuckingsonofamotherlessgoat.

One side effect both of the insane fever and the antibiotics (and, I presume, the ten pounds of snot) is nausea to a level I have never previously encountered. Seriously, this is what it must be like to have morning sickness when pregnant. I can’t eat anything I want to eat. Anything even remotely soft or textured or flavoured in any way activates my gag reflex. And I didn’t think I had a gag reflex! Once I swallowed a whole grape! I’ve nearly swallowed toothbrushes without gagging! (Note: not on purpose.)

I found this out the hard way with one spoonful of tomato soup that had me sprinting the, uh, six steps to my bathroom. (All right, it’s a small apartment.) Things that have proven OK: Golden Delicious apples, dry toast, unflavoured triscuits (rosemary and olive oil flavour NOT OK), dry crackers. Hot water with lemon. No tea. I can’t believe I’ve lived three days without tea. Even when I was staying with my uncle in the Guyana savannah studying fricking bullet ants, we had tea. (And centipedes, might I add. Tea and centipedes, that’s cool. I’m going to start a band and name it that.)

Here is the info insert for the fucking drug:

Pardon my mild and understandable annoyance, but WHO THE HELL DESIGNED AN ANTIBIOTIC THAT GIVES YOU HALLUCINATIONS?!

The reason I am posting is because yesterday after my second dose I actually did have a hallucination. And honestly, I’m fairly used to auditory and olfactory hallucinations, of which I’ve had quite a few over the past few years. They’re fine because you know you’re hallucinating and that takes away their power to scare me. Two examples:

1) I have a very, very, very common olfactory hallucination of gasoline. This came up once in an, um, intimate moment with my ex – who was as scrupulously clean as a cat and who would spend the entire day in the shower lathering and scrubbing if you let him, who always showered before dates and scrubbed out every nook and cranny. And I rolled over, sat up, and thought This is an olfactory hallucination but let’s just ask anyway, and said, “Did you fill up the truck today?” and he hadn’t. I pressed him for details on what else he’d been doing that day. It turned out he had stayed in and watched war documentaries. No gasoline at all.

2) (Slightly funnier) When The Hussy came to visit for the first time last year, we woke up on Sunday morning or whatever it was and I came out of the bedroom yawning and scratching my hair and he was already up and doing something on my computer. And I heard: “I AM THE GREAT GOD BAAL.”
I said, “What?”
BAAAAAAAAL.
He said, “What?”
I said, “Did you just say something?”
“No. I’m checking my Facebook!”
“Did you hear… the ceiling making any noises or anything?”
“No.”
“…Did your stomach just make a noise?”
He gave me a terribly pitying look and said, “Let’s just go out for breakfast, OK?”

But the hallucinations I got on this drug are completely beyond the pale. The dizziness and the nausea and the confusion and the disorientation and the persistent fever are tolerable. Barely tolerable.

After my first dose yesterday I started feeling dizzy and went to lie down on my futon and watch ‘Blue Planet,’ because David Attenborough is my go-to guy when I’m feeling really wretched. I had just gotten through ‘The Deep’ when the phone rang, and I had put the phone on the little side-table Lamo designed so I had it and my celphone within close reach because, hello lazy when I’m sick. I picked it up and saw the familiar ‘PARENTS’ on the orange call-display screen, and sat up, preparing my speech to tell my mother just how horrible I was feeling and that I had gone to the clinic like she said.

As soon as I sat up I was hit with a terrible wave of vertigo, sweat sprang to my forehead, and I stood up in preparation to run to the bathroom – but the phone was still ringing so I thought I’d just quickly pick it up and tell Mom that I was about to vomit like Regan Macneil and I’d call her back, so I pressed ‘talk’ and a stream of gibberish exited my mouth. Mom said, “Hello? Hello? Prem? Are you all right?” and I was trying to talk, trying to talk, nothing coming out but random burbling noises, and suddenly I lurched sideways and hit the carpet like a ton of bricks, knocking over one of my banana plants whose pot smashed to bits on its neighbouring pot. I lay there stupefied, blood trickling from a gash on my forearm where I’d put it down on a chunk of ceramic, terrified beyond words, still trying to talk to my mother – trying to scream for help and telling her that I’d just fallen and was lying on my scanner and a pile of paperbacks and I was bleeding and also I’d broken the pot that Dad brought for me when I moved in, sweating, on the verge of throwing up, watching the shining blood bubble and drip onto the carpet, and I said, “Oh fuck! My security deposit!” and she finally said, “Language!”

And then I was across the room, leaning on my world map. None of that happened. It was a hallucination. I was fine. The phone was back on the side table. I looked around, astonished, and saw that my balcony door was taped shut and it was snowing outside. The room was stiflingly hot so I went to the door and looked down. Chunks of green ceramic and the square block of the banana plant’s roots littered the ground and the spot of blood had changed from a circle to a triangle. I stared at it. I distinctly remember not only staring at it but the hairs on the back of my neck trying their damndest to stand up. It really did happen! It wasn’t a hallucination! I stepped carefully over the pieces and reached up as high as I could to grab the start of the tape strip, and pulled it down, and opened the balcony door to admit a welcome blast of cold air.

That didn’t happen either.

I taped up my balcony door in October. I untaped it in December. There was no tape. It didn’t happen.

When I ‘came to’ again I was standing in my hallway, staring at my dinosaur photos. This time it seemed to stick, the awakeness I mean, and I crept over to the computer desk and the balcony and my plants. They were perfectly intact, as was my arm. The balcony door was shut and locked. There was no blood on the carpet. No duct tape on the floor.

Mom called after dinner and the first thing I asked was whether she’d called earlier, because I thought perhaps a ringing phone really did become part of my hallucination, but she said, “No, we were on the south side all day. We ate paneer curry at Maurya Palace!” “Uh-huh,” I said. “Was Al home?” No, Al had spent the day at school working on some kind of plexiglass thing or something. “All day?” “Yes, all day. Why?”

Huh.

I should be contacting my doctor or something, but I am determined to stick out this drug. My lungs are seriously fucked up beyond the pale. I saw the X-rays. I’m coughing like a crazy old man who’s smoked for ninety years. This is the strongest antibiotic the doctor said he could give me without checking me into the hospital and I have to get rid of The Disease. But damn, it’s going to be a long week.