I have 101.5 F (or 38.6 C) fever and in retrospect I realize that maybe I should’ve told my boss who I am when I called her (instead of just rambling on with a tired, low voice about my fever), and I should’ve tried to get a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow. Can’t see any free times now. These aren’t all that massive mistakes in the grand scheme of things, but it made my addled brain wonder what others have done. Would just keep this thought to myself usually but during fever the ideas get stuck and start swirling around my brain, forever on repeat. So … uh … any good stories?
I was at a friend’s house celebrating a holiday, when I suddenly realized what I really needed was a nap. So, I stretched out on a nearby mat in the yard and went to sleep. I remember being a little worried about the etiquette of the situation, but not enough to be able to do anything about it.
the last time I felt off due to fever was when I got up to 102°F, and the decision I made was to take two ibuprofen. I certainly wasn’t disoriented or anything, I just knew shit wasn’t right.
The worst decision I ever made while having a fever was deciding one afternoon back in college that not having a headache meant I didn’t need to treat said fever, so I didn’t. I hung out with friends not long after and scared the crap out of them when during the middle of a conversation I interrupted to I ask them how they’d gotten neat lights to make patterns in their radiator and they realized I wasn’t joking. Apparently I seemed lucid besides accusing them of lying and being mean for not explaining how the lights got in there, so it took them a little while to remember I’d been a bit sick that week meaning I probably wasn’t on drugs or having a psychotic episode, and insist I take my temperature…which was 103 point something.
The weird thing to me is that I remember the incident as if there really were lights in the radiator. You could totally do it with tiny LEDs now, but back then it should have seemed odd at the time.
Well it wasn’t so much a bad decision but I noticed something was off since I was talking to people and my replies were off, I was hearing stuff they did not say and replying to it. Went home since I realized I delirious or something, next day I had a real high fever.
I had some kind of virus that trashed my whole system. Lost my sense of equilibrium, my vision was distorted, couldn’t think straight, blinding headache and on and on. By the third day I wasn’t getting better and was seriously starting to think I might die. Got it together enough to call the doctor and drove to the office.
I should never have tried driving. In addition to everything else, my judgement was impaired. I think I was as impaired as a seriously drunk driver. Thankfully, getting out of bed and going to the doctor kind of revived me and by the time I left the office I was in a lot better shape even though he hadn’t done anything or given me any medication. The ride home was a lot better than going in.
This wasn’t completely my fault. When I had mono in college and was in the infirmary, a well-meaning friend brought soup for me. Only she packed it in one of those peanut butter buckets
which naturally buckled when I tried to move it, and spilled the soup all over my hospital bed. Did I mention it was a soup containing dark leafy greens?
I got a fever during a severe UTI in college. I didn’t feel well and lay down in bed. For a few days it was just a haze of getting up to go to the bathroom, taking ibuprofen, then falling back into bed. I may have ordered a pizza in the middle somewhere, but I wasn’t eating much or drinking anything but a token amount of water. On the 3rd day, my mom (who knew I’d been feeling ill and wasn’t able to reach me on the phone) called in a wellness check to my property manager. She ended up driving down to pick me up and take me to the hospital.
I don’t think I would have died if she hadn’t been checking in on me, but possibly if I hadn’t gotten any better… I wasn’t in my right mind to call for help on my own.
Mono during college - I was as sick as I’ve ever been in my life, too weak to even walk to the bathroom, much less keep myself hydrated or nourished. I remember laying in my bed, thinking that it would just be simplest to go to sleep and never wake up. Thank goodness for my friend and roommate Pete, who woke me up at intervals and forced me to drink juice or ginger ale (pinching my nose at least a couple of times so I’d open my mouth,) and spooning canned soup down my ungrateful gullet. (I swear, I thought my tonsils would explode, they were so swollen.) I finally emerged, about 2.5 weeks later, having lost more than 15% of my body weight, so pale I was translucent, but alive.
I literally feel like I owe Pete my life. But I’ll never eat another can of Campbell’s Chicken & Anything soup again, if I have my druthers!
One night I had a fever and horrible pain in my abdomen. It finally got so bad, I [del]walked[/del] staggered to the hospital ER a few blocks away. I told them my appendix was ruptured, but they said it was constipation. They said I should go home and if it still hurt in the morning, I should come back. I was so delirious, I did what they said; I would have done ANYTHING they said, just to get rid of the pain. I don’t remember what happened that night, except I spent a lot of time on the toilet. In the morning, I somehow got back to the hospital, and was rushed immediately into surgery . . . for a ruptured appendix.
My big fever moment was also in college with a UTI. I wasn’t having any of the classic UTI symptoms, though, so didn’t suspect that was a problem. What I did have was a huge migraine, and I felt hot, but didn’t put it together. I didn’t have a thermometer, either.
I started with the headache Friday-Saturday and had to work Sunday night. By then, I was in the thick of the fever (in hindsight) and the headache was something else, but I was the head of the typesetting department for the school newspaper and I had staff to oversee. Man, I made so many mistakes that night, I couldn’t spell, couldn’t put sentences together. Back then, we still were using photo paper and lightboards. I did a lot of cutting words out with an x-acto and pasting corrections in that night.
Finally went to the student infirmary on Monday and the nurse just looked at me walking in and said, “you’re running a fever.” Took my temp and it was 102, likely had been all weekend.
Mine was an ALMOST disaster due to fever hell. I was buying my house and closing was scheduled something like four days out, and there was a weekend in there too. I got sick as hell, delerious from fever, and somehow in the middle of that mess I managed to realize that I hadn’t yet moved funds from one account to another - yeah, my closing costs would have been non-existant. Imagine the shitty feeling from being very ill combined with the electric terror of realizing you’ve just probably MASSIVELY screwed yourself out of something important. Hair standing up all over violently aching head. At the time, transfers between two unrelated institutions could take several days. I remember sitting at the table, staring hard at the documents, head in hand, trying to figure out what I had to do to make it happen. There was a phone call and some very nice person at the money place took care of me. Not a situation I’d care to repeat…it’s amazing how very difficult some common things (like thinking!) become when you’re in a fever.
In 2012, when I was in-between jobs, I omitted getting a flu shot to save some money and, of course, got a rip-roaring case of the flu. My roommate got me to go to bed, gave me Theraflu and hot tea, and turned the tv on low to give me a little ambiant noise to cover up the noises in the house (I have 3 dogs, the setters in my screen name). He left the remote on the bed next to me in case I came to and wanted to change the channel.
Sometime during the night I woke up partially (I say partially because I remember none of this at all) and a shopping channel was on that had an ‘order by remote’ function. In my fever stupor, I did everything they told me…ordered by remote pretty much everything they put on the screen. About a week later, box after box of miscellaneous junk started showing up on my front porch. Thankfully an understanding customer service rep was willing to let me return it all if I promised to block their channel the next time I got sick. lol
When I was in my early 20s, I got a god-awful stomach virus. I couldn’t keep anything down. Not ice chips, not water, not ginger ale. My fever shot up and I became dehydrated. I kept “falling asleep” (which might’ve been passing out) all morning.
My roommate came home for lunch, and I told her I was going to drive myself to the ER, then started babbling something about having to get better for a final exam that night (I wasn’t in school). Apparently I was quite insistent that I was fine and could drive myself.
So she hid my car keys and drove me to the ER were I got IV fluids and anti-nausea meds. She told me later that it was like I was a really, really obnoxious drunk. Oops.
I was home sick with some virus or other and decided while I had all that time on my hands I’d work on the shawl I was knitting for my mom’s xmas present.
3 days later I had to pick out hours worth of insanity out of the intricate, complex lacework. I hadn’t even thought to set in a lifeline. Remember the video about spiders on LSD? Yeah, like that.
