What is the most inopportune time you've been/gotten sick?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Ah I have many of these lessee…

Chicken Pox Christmas Eve when I was 13. The itching was unreal as was the nasty fever and flu that followed. I was sick for almostg 3 weeks. My sister who is 5 years older than me came down with the Chicken Pox that New Years Eve. Ruined her first ‘legal drinking’ New Year (I am a Brit)

Stuck in the middle of the Sahara in Libya in a camp and I come down with a nasty Gastro bug/parasite/infection. I am too sick to get on a regular plane back to Tripoli. Medevac’d out. This was the day before I was due to fly out of Tripoli which was the day before we were headed on vacation. I spent 4 days in hospital after that one and was on medication for almost 2 months.

Puking on the side of the road in Kazakstan…6 hours from anywhere. I had to stop the convoy and lay down at the side of the road roughly every 30 mins to pull myself together to continue.

The flight back from Lagos was the longest 7 hours of my life. The cramping started before I got on the plane. The projectile vomiting continued through the flight. Then as I am standing in the longest passport control line in history the runs start and I just make it to the bathroom. Urgh.

Pneumonia the week I turned 21.

42

This sprang to mind.

43

I got food poisoning on the family trip to the Grand Canyon when I was 10, which was bad enough, but then, just after I’d recovered, I got it again. And somewhere in between I had a migraine which induced yet more vomiting.

I think I set a world record for vomiting on that trip. The saddest thing was that I was far from the only family member to get food poisoning–I think the only person out of ten total people on the trip who didn’t was my iron-stomached grandfather–and EVERYTHING went wrong on the trip. On the inbound train from Chicago, the staff ran out of food. The hotel lost our reservations. We were supposed to have two rental cars and they only had one for us–for ten people. The hotel TV went out…not so bad usually, but the 1984 Summer Olympics were on. It was cloudy for a good majority of the trip and you couldn’t even see the canyon most of the time, and there is nothing else to do there except see the canyon. The trip was so bad that my food poisoning was mostly forgotten, which was certainly a relief to me.

44

My brother’s wedding. I was a bridesmaid. Woke up the morning of the wedding day puking my guts out, temperature of 100, too sick to even sit up, much less get dressed. I was in a hotel with my parents, and THEY weren’t sick, and they prodded me into getting dressed, made up, and into the car to go to the church. You’d think I was deliberately trying to make a scene! During the ceremony I thought I was going to faint and had to slip away into a side room of the church until I could stand upright. I felt a bit better as the day went on and got through the reception OK. Wish I had a wedding party picture from that day - never mind the bride, I looked spectacular, even at deaths door!

45

Ugh. The Thanksgiving that my husband reunited with his birth family I managed to spend the whole damn visit enjoying a cavalcade of flu symptoms. First it was nausea and projectile vomiting, then upper respiratory with a side of diarrhea. I had a terrible cough and even spent a few days with laryngitis.

I just hung out in bed in the hotel and moaned a lot.

46

I’m really good at this.

  1. December 24th, 1993? I was seven years old. I told my parents I was’t feeling great, and mostly slept the entire 8+ hour drive to Grandma’s house. By Christmas morning I was crying and didn’t want to get out of bed. The only remotely good thing was that my two aunts (both nurses) and uncle (an EMT of some type) all agreed that I probably had the flu, but since I was drinking Gatorade and my fever wasn’t too high, we didn’t need to spend Christmas day at a walk-in clinic.

  2. October 2003. My cousin is getting married in Ohio. Another cousin just had a baby a month or so prior. I’m applying to a fairly nearby college, and schedule an admissions interview for a day before the wedding. I develop a sinus infection the night before we leave, flail through the interview in a drugged state, don’t dare to go near the new baby, and go back to the hotel immediately after the ceremony, skipping the reception all together.

  3. Christmas 2004. Pretty much exactly the same as example one, so again, I skipped the holiday festivities to huddle under blankets and cough my throat raw.

  4. Spring 2005. I wake up in the small hours one Saturday morning and get to the bathroom just in time to empty out my stomach. I have a belt promotion in, oh, eight hours for my karate club, followed by an end-of-the-year picnic for the same, followed by a birthday party for my roommate including dinner and a concert. Instead, I spent the day in bed (and the bathroom) occasionally trying to sip water and promptly puking it back up. It was not the fun-filled day I’d planned.

47

A bit less than a year ago, at the height of swine flu hysteria, I came down with the flu. Not a cold, not some imagined disease that I thought maybe possibly was the flu, but the flu—I was constantly exhausted, fever of 102-ish (taken with an honest-to-God thermometer), chills, etc. This was also coming up on final exam time, and the very day I got the flu I had to give a presentation-that-counted-as-a-final in one of my evening classes. There was no way I could give a presentation in the condition I was in, so I emailed my professor and told him I’d hit the clinic that day and let him know, but don’t expect me that day. I almost didn’t even make it to the clinic. I lived off-campus, normally taking the train to class, but that was really out of the question. I did have a car at the time, but I wasn’t sure if I could drive—I almost called a friend to give me a lift, but ultimately decided to tough it out and drive myself.

I got to the clinic, checked in, and was promptly checked out by a doctor there. Temperature taken, peering in my throat, etc. “You’re sure you haven’t taken anything for the fever?” “Nope, I haven’t taken any medicine all day.” Your temperature is 98.6. There’s nothing wrong with you." “…”

Lacking a note from a doctor—what, a professor is going to take a college student at his word that he’s sick during final exam season?—I went to class and did my presentation. I could hardly concentrate, and in the best of times I’m a nervous and stuttery public speaker. There was no way I even eked out a C on that presentation, which counted as our final exam.

Final grade: 98%. Whether pity was taken on me because I was obviously sick, or my flu had stage fright and disappeared when others came near allowing me to kick that presentation’s ass (and fake out the doctors), I don’t know.

48

In 6th grade the children’s church choir was set to put on their annual musical. I had a big number of solo parts, but the day before I suddenly had a sore throat. I think some of the paretns were alarmed to hear an 11 year old rasp through sons about how Jesus loves me with the voice of a pack a day smoker.

Does starting your period right before a night of anticipated nookie for the first time in ages count for this thread?

49

The last time I needed a new place to live, I developed pink eye on the Sunday before the week I had scheduled all my apartment viewings. I was in dismay- who is going to rent a room to the girl whose eyes are oozing pus??

Luckily, it was mostly cleared up by the time I met my current roommate.

50

I got a horrible, toxic upper respiratory infection on my first plane ride. Hubby was going to Boston for a big meeting and I got to go along. I’d never flown before, plus I have a horrible fear of heights. By the time we were ready to land in Boston, I didn’t care about being terrified, but more that I was going to drown in my own snot. The hotel staff found out and were so nice to me, brought me lots of tea,boxes of tissues and pastries. I wrote them a nice, long letter when I got home…that is, when my head was clear enough to think properly!

The other inopportune time was getting a 24 hour stomach bug the day before daHubby’s and my wedding. Instead of having a nice rehearsal dinner, I was camped out in bed, my mom, dad and daHubby wondering if I was going to make it to the wedding. I was exhausted the next day but I made it! I had enough makeup on to take care of six drag queens but DAMN I looked good in my photos!

51

Because you are awesome and also made me laugh, yes. Yes, it does.

52

Two things happened simultaneously when I sat down to take my GREs. The guy behind me announced that this is the most important test we’ll ever take in our lifetime and I was suddenly aware that I was staring down the barrel of a screaming, blinding, absolute killer of a migraine. Probably the worst one of my life.

I don’t remember a single other thing about the test or how I got home or anything but white hot pain. My scores were low(ish) average, but as it turned out, they were irrelevant to the graduate programs I applied to and I never had to use them for anything. :stuck_out_tongue:

53

My gallbladder decided to flare up - when we were snowed in under 18+ inches of snow. As in, if I’d had to go to the ER we had no way of getting out of the house. The main road, not far away, had been plowed at least somewhat - as had our street, even, but our driveway was still completely covered.

I had visions of dragging on boots, stumbling out to the main road, and calling 911 from my cell and saying “come get me”. This was in the middle of the night, BTW. Fortunately the pain passed so I didn’t have to implement this plan.

The surgery for same was just before the February blizzard. I just knew I was going to develop post-op complications when we were snowed in (didn’t happen, thankefully).

54

In 1984 I got the Hong Kong flu and was bedridden for a week. I had a two week old baby and that really was hard.

55

Military courses often end with a final exam known as a Final EX - it’s a practical exam to see if you learned everything you needed to learn.

I am a Public Affairs officer, so my most important career course is the Public Affairs course, which, for me, was a year long distance learning course with a few residencies. It runs once a year. The Final EX was going to be some sort of military catastrophe that would steadily escalate and we would have to deal with faux media, “public” etc. It’s a very stressful situation and can result in derailing your entire career. It was supposed to be two days, the end of a two weel stay in Ottawa and Hull.

A few weeks prior, I started a new med to help stave off migraines. It was working well.

The day before the Ex was to start, I did not feel well, a migraine was coming on. I took the medication I was supposed to.

As we sat around the table in our assigned groups I started feeling very weird and awful. I can’t really describe it, I just felt very wrong. I didn’t say anything because of the importance of the next two days. The instructor doing the briefing stopped speaking and asked if I was okay.

I suddenly became aware that I was going to be sick. I jumped up and ran from the room, luckily followed by a good friend because as soon as I got into the bathroom I started getting tunnel vision and went down on my knees. Seconds later I started having trouble breathing.

They called an ambulance where I was rushed to a hospital in Hull - you try remembering your French when suffering from an anaphylactic reaction.

Yup - had to have the epinephrine shot and everything - I was kept in the hospital for the rest of the day.

The next day, still feeling very odd, I got to make up all of the tests and everything from the day earlier. To make things worse, I only had one shot at everything since they didn’t have time to re-test. I think the fact that I was still able to lead a press conference and face a scrum to be a pretty good test of my skills :slight_smile:

Thereby jumping ahead of arriving at Basic Training with bronchitis.

56

I was coming down with bronchitis a while back on the morning of a first round interview that was just under an hour’s drive away. I literally went from “kinda okay if groggy” to “I’m not sure if I’ll make it home” in the space of two hours, an hour of which occurred during the interview. Within the passing of the first hour, I was pretty bad; by the second, I was barely coherent and a mile from home.

I didn’t get the job or a call for a second round interview. Oh well.

57

On a DTW to Frankfurt flight, I vomited pretty much nonstop from Newfoundland to Frankfurt due to a Migraine. I was either puking in the lavatory or laying on the ground outside the john wishing for whomever was inside to hurry up so I could go inside and puke.

That.was.a.fun.flight.

Bonus#1: I got off the plane first.

Bonus #2: I looked worse than my passport photo. Yeah, that should say it all.

Bonus #3 When we got back on the flight four days later and had the same flight crew, they all remembered me and treated me like a Goddess. ( I was waaaaay better.)

58

When I was working as a telephone installer, I had New Year’s Day off as a holiday, but was supposed to work the next day.

At the party I went to, I came down with the flu. The terrible, horrible, wish you were dead flu. I was okay until 10:30, but at midnight I was lying limp in the living room, hoping to die. And it got worse from there.

Naturally all my coworkers and MY BOSS figured I had the mother of all whopping hangovers (I have never had a hangover, technically, but if I had one, that would have been the mother of all). MY BOSS came to my place to make sure I was really sick/drag me into work. I managed to get to the door and then collapsed. I had a very high fever. I was too sick to go to the doctor. It had taken all my energy just to call in.)

The worst thing was that I had to go on light duty for like three weeks. The “light duty” job was in the stock room and started at 5 a.m.

My coworkers (who fortunately I only saw at the early morning meeting) kidded me for six months about my “hangover.”

59

This past summer in small helicopter, with 6 other strangers, flying into the Grand Canyon. I started hurling about 5 minutes into the trip and continued the entire way there and back. I went through 4 barf bags.

60

I’d gotten a job with a company that used to be my customer. Because they all knew me, and because the new companies HQ (and my new boss) were in Phoenix, while I was in Minnesota, all of my interviewing had been done over the phone. I knew these people, but I’d never met them.

So I fly down to Phoenix for my first day of work and a week of training. Day 3 I feel like crap, running a low fever, light headed, head ache… I had to beg off a couple of afterwork dinner/drinks/sociallizing evening, because I felt so bad.