I’ve been sick since Wednesday. I had originally thought it was just stress from me getting too worked up over problems I was having at work with debugging runtime errors through multiple layers of undocumented abstractions, since I spent a couple of hours shaking and shivering after I finally let my wife persaude me to quit for the day.
But I had been feverish yesterday with headaches and muscle aches. Taking aspirin helped, and I managed to get through six and a half hours at my day job while accomplishing some useful work. However, I had had trouble getting to sleep and went through a couple of hours of sweating and shaking once the aspirin I had taken before bed wore off.
I’d have gone to the urgent care clinic today to get a diagnosis, but my temperature is back to typical and Catherine says I look and sound much better. Maybe I’m getting over it. At least I’ll be on vacation next week and won’t be working during the first week of July.
Should I have seen a doctor right away? Maybe, but at the same time I don’t want to waste my money or a doctor’s time just to find out that I got hit upside the head by a summer cold or something equally trivial. If I had cause to suspect something truly serious like meningitis I’d have gone already.
But I already know I’m working too damn hard for too damn long, getting paid too damn little, and paying too damn much in taxes on what damn little I do earn from my work. That’s not something American medicine can fix.
Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of Black Sabbath might not be doctors, but I know what my problem is. I’m killing myself to live. Just like everybody else.