On Tuesday afternoon I came down with some sort of nasty flu bug. I'm still not quite sure what it was. All evening long I suffered through increasingly intense bouts of nausea, delirium, chills, fever, and intense body aches, as if someone had gone and whacked every single muscle in my body individually ten times with a meat tenderizer.
Later that night my friend Aaron discovers me in this state and decides to seize upon the opportunity to introduce me to the world of holistic medicine, of which he has become a recent advocate. I suspect that this is largely due to the recent influence of the health-conscious girl he's currently dating, since I happen to know for a fact that Aaron did not earn the nickname "Dump Truck" as a youth by being particularly mindful of the nutritional value of the things he put into his body. Nevertheless, at that particular point I was in no condition to protest his decision, so off we went to the health food store, with me shivering and twitching in a semifetal position in the passenger seat the entire way.
Once there, Aaron grabs a basket and proceeds to fill it with strange brown bottles of various sizes, many of which are adorned with labels written in Chinese, while I retire to the public restroom, where I proceed to commit an act of defecation of such a heinous and vile nature that it need not be relived on the pages of this fair site. When I find Aaron again, I notice the basket piled high with all sorts of weird shit: bottles of pomegranate juice, Kombucha tea, loquat extract, elderberry & red root throat spray, plum paste balls, propolis echinacea, and then the stuff with the Chinese writing on it. The total cost of all this health food madness? Seventy bucks. A healthier me would have been tempted to protest such extravagance, but at the time it all became part of this feverish, delusional fantasy world I was tripping around in at the time, a world in which the gravity of monetary issues became inconsequential compared with the very real possibility of my brain matter liquefying and pouring out of both my ears, the little brain cells gleefully sliding down my jacket and onto the tiled floor of the market, skipping and dancing away on their miniscule neuron legs down the produce aisle, over the Birkenstocked feet of startled vegans and dreadlocked hippies, with me frantically chasing after them, trying to scoop them all back up without creating too much of a scene.
Back in the car, Aaron takes the bottles out one at a time and schools me on proper dosages: take two of these, drink half a bottle of this, put three drops of this stuff under your tongue, mix two teaspoons of this with a cup of cold water, smear some of this on your left knee, light some incense and spin in a circle fourteen times, etcetera. I take the recommended dosages from each bottle as he hands them to me, but all information regarding the future application of each remedy is summarily rejected by my feverish brain, and I remember none of it. Upon arriving home, I promptly take three Tylenol PM, turn the heater on full blast, and crawl shivering into bed.
Two and a half hours later:
Forty-five minutes after that:
The next four hours are spent writhing in agony in the tangled mass of sheets and blankets that was once my bed, my entire body feeling as though it was covered with pressure-sensitive low-voltage electrodes, causing my skin to crawl and ache every time it came into contact with any foreign material. Occasionally I would rise in a fitful state of delirium to stagger across my room, slump against a wall, and babble and groan unintelligibly in a dialect that would make a Haitian voodoo practitioner run screaming for the hills.
I can't remember how or when, but at some wee hour of the morning I eventually did collapse into an exhausted sleep, staying in bed until one o'clock yesterday afternoon. When I finally rejoined the land of the living, I felt completely healed, with none of the symptoms which had plagued me the night before, save for a gnawing hollowness in the pit of a belly that had gone for too long without actual food. Whether or not this could be taken as an endorsement of the miracles of herbal medicine, or just another example of a particularly nasty 24-hour stomach flu, is anyone's guess. If there are any pearls of wisdom to be gleaned from this experience, one in particular stands out in my mind:
Get your flu shots, kids.
Later that night my friend Aaron discovers me in this state and decides to seize upon the opportunity to introduce me to the world of holistic medicine, of which he has become a recent advocate. I suspect that this is largely due to the recent influence of the health-conscious girl he's currently dating, since I happen to know for a fact that Aaron did not earn the nickname "Dump Truck" as a youth by being particularly mindful of the nutritional value of the things he put into his body. Nevertheless, at that particular point I was in no condition to protest his decision, so off we went to the health food store, with me shivering and twitching in a semifetal position in the passenger seat the entire way.
Once there, Aaron grabs a basket and proceeds to fill it with strange brown bottles of various sizes, many of which are adorned with labels written in Chinese, while I retire to the public restroom, where I proceed to commit an act of defecation of such a heinous and vile nature that it need not be relived on the pages of this fair site. When I find Aaron again, I notice the basket piled high with all sorts of weird shit: bottles of pomegranate juice, Kombucha tea, loquat extract, elderberry & red root throat spray, plum paste balls, propolis echinacea, and then the stuff with the Chinese writing on it. The total cost of all this health food madness? Seventy bucks. A healthier me would have been tempted to protest such extravagance, but at the time it all became part of this feverish, delusional fantasy world I was tripping around in at the time, a world in which the gravity of monetary issues became inconsequential compared with the very real possibility of my brain matter liquefying and pouring out of both my ears, the little brain cells gleefully sliding down my jacket and onto the tiled floor of the market, skipping and dancing away on their miniscule neuron legs down the produce aisle, over the Birkenstocked feet of startled vegans and dreadlocked hippies, with me frantically chasing after them, trying to scoop them all back up without creating too much of a scene.
Back in the car, Aaron takes the bottles out one at a time and schools me on proper dosages: take two of these, drink half a bottle of this, put three drops of this stuff under your tongue, mix two teaspoons of this with a cup of cold water, smear some of this on your left knee, light some incense and spin in a circle fourteen times, etcetera. I take the recommended dosages from each bottle as he hands them to me, but all information regarding the future application of each remedy is summarily rejected by my feverish brain, and I remember none of it. Upon arriving home, I promptly take three Tylenol PM, turn the heater on full blast, and crawl shivering into bed.
Two and a half hours later:
Forty-five minutes after that:
The next four hours are spent writhing in agony in the tangled mass of sheets and blankets that was once my bed, my entire body feeling as though it was covered with pressure-sensitive low-voltage electrodes, causing my skin to crawl and ache every time it came into contact with any foreign material. Occasionally I would rise in a fitful state of delirium to stagger across my room, slump against a wall, and babble and groan unintelligibly in a dialect that would make a Haitian voodoo practitioner run screaming for the hills.
I can't remember how or when, but at some wee hour of the morning I eventually did collapse into an exhausted sleep, staying in bed until one o'clock yesterday afternoon. When I finally rejoined the land of the living, I felt completely healed, with none of the symptoms which had plagued me the night before, save for a gnawing hollowness in the pit of a belly that had gone for too long without actual food. Whether or not this could be taken as an endorsement of the miracles of herbal medicine, or just another example of a particularly nasty 24-hour stomach flu, is anyone's guess. If there are any pearls of wisdom to be gleaned from this experience, one in particular stands out in my mind:
Get your flu shots, kids.
See you later today in the pits of hell. You know where I mean.