Fever
It has been a while since I had a fever – that would have been Covid last year. While I knew the cause of that illness, I do not know what caused my temperature to spike this time around. One minute I was happily eating my lunch, next minute I knew something was very wrong. The fever continued all day yesterday, and every time I lay down, I fell asleep, so was thus surprised that I still managed to get a full eight-hour sleep in last night, waking at 5am. While the temperature has returned to normal, I feel washed out this morning. Writing my blog yesterday was about the only thing I managed to do. Reading was too difficult, doing puzzles in the paper, playing games on my phone, even listening to a video recording all fell into the too-hard basket after 10 minutes or so. So basically, I wasted a day. I tried once or twice to get up but fell back into bed after only a few minutes. I had just finished a course of antibiotics for a streptococcal infection the day before so wondered if that had anything to do with the fever. Usually one can guess the cause, a sore throat, a rumbly stomach, urinary infection but this time there didn’t appear to be anything amiss with the rest of my body.
When I was a child I had fevers frequently, the most common reason being tonsilitis, that was, until my tonsils were removed when I was about 12. I remember the joy of being well for a whole year and subsequent years afterwards. Then there were all the common childhood illnesses like mumps, measles and chicken pox. As I got older, the fevers decreased with only spikes when I had the flu or something similar. I did have one when I first got the pericarditis as well, but that only lasted a couple of days.
I always used to have the same dream when I was sick as well, hard to describe, but like a lot of lines, accompanied by a humming. I had a version of that dream on Friday night, but as is often the case with dreams for me, the memory sits just out of my reach, leaving only a knowing that I’d had it.
When I was nursing, the standard care for a fever was a tepid sponge. I hated doing these as I still remembered my own experiences and that was of shivering profusely and being extremely cold. This shivering was the body’s way of raising the temperature and thus being in a better position to fight the invading organism. Adding cold water to a person’s body while feeling cold like this was the worst thing one could do, I thought. Another standard care was giving paracetamol or the like, to reduce the temperature. When we do things like that, we are taking away the body’s natural defences and thus making it a lot harder for it to fight the illness. Generally, when I have been sick as an adult, I try to lay off the paracetamol in order to let the body fight the disease the best way it knows how.
I didn’t have the shivering yesterday as my fever only reached 38 degrees which was good but I did succumb to some pain relief on Friday because of all the muscle aches, most likely caused by the toxins the bugs were producing.
Our bodies are wonderful mechanisms in the way they maintain their equilibrium, fight diseases and generally keep us healthy and well. They don’t ask a lot of us in return. We can abuse them and flog them and still they bounce back. I have probably been one of the worst in terms of what I have fed my body, sugar wise that is, and I have overworked it over the years. Perhaps, now that I am older I will pay for these indiscretions or maybe it will continue humbly serving me.