Ill (in bed, and riding the porcelain horse) with a food poisoning style bug, thanks to which I was able, in only a few hours, to lose almost 3 Kilos.I won’t go into the full gory details, but trust me, you don’t want to do it.
Is this Swine flu? Well I had no fever, although I could report 3/8 other symptoms off the list on the NHS website, and some say fever isn’t a necessary symptom. Any of the eight could be caused by a wide variety of possible baddies. So how do I know? It appears that as far as UK authorities are concerned if you have a few common symptoms and think you’ve got Swine Flu, that’s what you’ve got.
So the question becomes, do I want to think I’ve got it? If I were the sort of person to get someone to pick up some Tamiflu and stick it on eBay, probably yes. As it is, I’m not the type. Confronted by a pack of tamiflu I’d feel duty bound to take it. And the well-attested side-effects associated with that treatment are, er, exactly the rather unpleasant symptoms I’ve been suffering in the first place!
Well, to paraphrase T. S . Eliot, the point of all our journeying is to arrive back at the place from which we started but knowing how we got there. In that spirit, I think I’ll stick with my amateur diagnosis of gastroenteritis, and hope to be back at work tomorrow.
6 comments:
Flu is generally upper respiratory and not a stomach bug. No doubt food poisoning or some other disease - not swine flu. Hope you feel better after some sleep and rehydration.
Thanks, Ann. Such was very much the logic of my own amateur diagnosis... Kidding aside, I'm sure it's right really; but do wonder whether a system based entirely on self-diagnosis can help the accurate reporting of SF.
Praying for a swift recovery (of the 3 kilos!), Bishop!
Go well.
Who says that it can be flu without a fever? That sounds to me like the kind of people who cough a little and then say they have "a touch of flu".
When my daughter had it, we were told clearly that it isn't swine flu if it isn't accompanied by a high fever of at least 38.5 degrees.
The one difference to ordinary flu is that the fever can disappear completely in the course of a day only to reappear in full force over night.
I hope you feel better soon!
I really hope you feel better soon, but in your distress thanks for providing me with light relief- "riding the porcelain horse"! Never heard that one before, thanks for increasing my idiom collection. : )
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