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The Escalation of Events... |
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So after a reasonably quiet start to the year, April has arrived and events have picked up a bit.
It has been no surprise that as Autumn came along, the weather has been unpredictable, and the temperatures fluctuate pretty vastly from day to day. However inevitably because of this, everybody I know has been getting sick.
First it was people at work. Then one Sunday I went around to Dad's place for dinner, and he and Nick were both sick with the cold/flu.
The next week Taina came down with it. And once that happened, I knew there was no escaping it anymore.
Sure enough, several days after Taina got sick, I came down with it.
It all hit on Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. I started the workday feeling fine. By lunchtime my throat felt...just weird. Not sore. Just...not quite right somehow.
And then it got worse. By the end of the day, I could feel a sinus headache building and I just generally felt tired and yuck.
Wednesday I took the day off work, because I had a sore throat, felt a bit off, and I figured if I went to work I'd only end up passing it on to everyone else.
I didn't want to use too much sick leave though, so by the time Thursday came along, I figured I should be okay to go to work. On Thursday morning, my voice was all croaky and deep-sounding, and I had a mild sinus headache, but other than that, I was okay.
I worked the morning fine. Avoided serving customers mostly where possible, but I cased up all the new glasses orders that came in that morning, made a few phone calls to people, just did bits and pieces of stuff.
By midday/early afternoon I felt super tired for no apparent reason. I couldn't stop yawning every few seconds.
Then my stomach started to feel odd. At first I thought maybe it was because I was hungry, because I usually don't get to have lunch until about 2.30 or 3.00 on a Thursday because I start later than most of the rest of the staff and have to wait for them all to have lunch first.
At about 2.30 I had to do a dispense, because everyone else was busy. But I was so tired and felt so unwell that I wasn't really paying much attention at all and had no idea what I was doing.
So afterwards, I went to Amanda and was like, "I have no idea who's on lunch now and how many people still need to go on lunch, but I have to go now. I can't carry on any longer."
So I went on lunch, and forced myself to gulp down the fruit smoothie I had made myself for lunch, despite finding it really hard to make myself drink it because I was feeling kinda nauseous.
I also had a mammoth headache by then, so I put my head down on the table briefly, to rest my head for a short while. Next thing I knew, Izzy was waking me up because I had fallen asleep and slept for over an hour.
The moment I woke up, I initially felt great. My headache was gone, I didn't feel nauseous anymore. It was amazing. But less than ten seconds after waking up, it all hit me again twice as bad.
Izzy tried to ask around and see if anyone could cover me for closing the store at 6.30 so I could go home sick, but noone was able or willing to do it. Amanda came in to tell me this, and so I told her I understood, and that I felt like maybe if I could try sleeping again a little longer, maybe by the time I woke up again, I would feel okay enough to work for the last part of the day until closing.
It wasn't busy, so Amanda was okay with this, and I instantly fell back asleep in the staff room. I woke up again a little later, when Cameron came in to get a drink. Once again, when I woke my first thought was I felt great again, but after a few seconds the unbearably intense headache and nausea hit again, plus this time I felt super cold, which was weird, considering I'd felt hot and sweaty earlier in the day.
Cameron found me a spare blazer, which was nice and kept me from freezing. I have no idea whose blazer it was though, because it was so tiny I couldn't open my shoulders fully while wearing it and I felt like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Nevertheless, I fell asleep again straight away, and then a little while later, I woke up again. This time, after the initial beautiful five seconds of feeling great, suddenly I felt like I was about to vomit. I didn't have time to go out the back and down the hallway to the bathroom, so I vomited all in the kitchen sink. All of that lovely, healthy fruit smoothie I had forced myself to drink came back out again.
As soon as I had finished being sick, and started trying to clean it up, Izzy came into the staff room again. I informed her she probably would be best to avoid touching the sink or any of the dishes nearby for a while, and told her what had happened.
It's funny how something that was previously impossible suddenly becomes possible once you vomit all over everyone's dirty dishes.
Previously, there had been no possible way of me going home sick early, because there was noone at all able to cover my closing hours. But once vomit-palooza happened, suddenly Amanda announces that the Optometrist David was happy to work late to cover me after he finished testing, and that I could go home immediately. Where there's some vomit, there's a way.
By this stage, it was 5.00 and Amanda and a couple of other people were leaving anyway. But before leaving, I made sure to do the dishes, because...well, I'm pretty sure noone else wanted to go anywhere near that.
Even once I left work, the difficult part wasn't over. I still had to drive home, through rush hour traffic back to Paremata.
Despite still feeling very tired, and very headachy, the fatigue wasn't the issue as far as driving home.
But part way home, while in a non-moving queue of traffic just before where the traffic splits up into State Highway 2, going to the Hutt Valley and State Highway 1, going to Porirua, I suddenly felt like I needed to vomit again.
Problem was, I was stuck in a queue. There was nowhere to pull over. The traffic was still occasionally moving, stopping, then starting and moving a few metres, then stopping again. So I needed to be watching the road pretty closely. So in the end, I ended up vomiting, while driving, looking ahead at the road while puking all over my tunic, and some on the seatbelt and the steering wheel.
And then just had to drive the rest of the way home surrounded by it.
Well, it's a new experience. My car has had a full life: I've fallen asleep while driving in it once, I've camped an entire night there once, I've had sex in it, I've sneezed and coughed all over it, I've eaten numerous meals and snacks, and spilled food and drinks in it many times. I've moved my entire life's possessions in it from flat to flat over the years. I've had it broken into and things stolen from it more than once. I've had it break down on me, and had a tyre blow out on the motorway once. I've left rubbish in it for far too long. I've accidentally left food in the boot before and forgotten about it until it went off. I've transported various friends, coworkers and family members in it.
But this is the first time I've actually puked all through it. Sorry, car.
Once I got home, I went inside and immediately without pausing a second, removed all of my gross clothes and flopped straight into bed.
And then I slept. From quarter to six, until 11.30 that night I slept. Then I got up briefly, had some dinner and drank as much water as I could, then when straight back to bed, and slept from midnight until 7.15 the next morning. So all up, a 12-13 hour sleep.
Fortunately, Friday was the normal start of my weekend, so I didn't need to worry about whether I was well enough for work when I woke up the next morning.
Unfortunately though, that weekend I had plans.
Friday when I woke up, I had had such a long sleep that I felt so much better. Me and Taina went and got Subway for breakfast, and I took him into his classes at Tech for the day.
Then, back home I prepared an overnight bag, and headed into town, and then took a bus to the airport.
I flew up to Auckland that afternoon. Smooth flight, but my ears were popping really bad and got pretty sore. My ears are super sensitive to air pressure changes normally, but as I was sick and my ears and nose were blocked it was way worse.
But, I got there and took an Uber out to the Hotel me and Dad were booked to stay in for the night. Met Dad there, he had gone up to Auckland earlier that morning, as he had some work conference on earlier in the day in Auckland as well.
Me and Dad went to a Malaysian restaurant for dinner. My stomach must have been fully recovered, because I had a Nasi Goreng and was fully fine. The meal was massive though, so I literally ate less than half of it and got the rest in a doggy bag and took it back to the Hotel.
Then, me and Dad headed out to Ellerslie Racecourse, which was where the Pop-Up Shakespeare Globe was situated this year.
The pop-up Globe is a temporary theatre, made to replicate the old Globe theatre in London where many of Shakespeare's plays were originally performed. Last year it was erected in central Auckland for a couple of months over Summer and then pulled down once they had performed a few plays over the couple of months it was up.
This year, they erected it further out from the centre of the city. It was nice though, a big garden area to hang out in before the show started.
This year, me and Dad went to see Much Ado About Nothing. Unlike Twelfth Night, which we saw last year, I wasn't super familiar with Much Ado About Nothing, hadn't fully read it or seen it performed before. I had read a short story synopsis version of the plot in this Shakespeare kids short story book my aunty Helen bought me when I was a kid.
The show was really funny, a lot of audience interaction. A lot of the cast were Pacific Islanders too, so they incorporated a few aspects of that into the show, in the costumes and some of the music, which made the performance a bit unique.
Afterwards, me and Dad headed back to the hotel for the night, and then the next morning flew back to Wellington.
I had a few quiet hours back home on Saturday afternoon to catch up with Taina, but then in the evening we headed back into Wellington, because my work friend Cameron was having a birthday party. He's 22, but he was having the party as a belated 21st birthday party.
It was great for Taina. I think he misses the days when we had our full group of friends we had from school. Back then, there were quite a few of us, and a lot of people in the group were quite geeky- into anime, and video games, and cosplaying and things, and it was something Taina could share with them.
But now, our group has thinned out to just a smaller core group, and everyone is older, and has more life commitments, and so people can't catch up that often anymore.
So it was cool for Taina to meet Cameron, and his flatmate Jordan, and also Jesse's fiancé Troy who are all massive geeks and he could chat to them about anime and stuff, and also get drunk together with them.
I had fun too, chatting/bitching about work stuff with Jesse and Siobhan. At least, until Siobhan went outside and mysteriously disappeared for a while with this one guy friend of Cameron's.
We didn't stay super late, because I was aware I still was recovering from my flu and didn't want to make it worse. Plus, Cameron's flat was tiny and there were quite a few people, so it got pretty noisy and I was having to shout to talk to people, which wasn't so good on my already croaky voice.
But, when we left Taina was pretty drunk, which for him means he was super energetic, hyper and chatty...but adorable.
He chatted to me all the way home, said some crazy nonsense that I can't remember much of now, but cracked me up at the time. We had to pull over in the middle of nowhere halfway home, so Taina could pee on the side of the road. Kind of funny, because I'm pretty sure the cars driving past realised what he was doing.
When we got home, he was still too awake and energetic to go to bed, so he decided randomly to call our friend Luke (even though it was almost midnight by then). Fortunately Luke was still up, and so they chatted for a long while.
And so, despite how pretty bad my sickness was on that Thursday, I ended up having a pretty full on weekend.
From Sunday onwards, it was back to work for another week. But I still haven't had much chill time. Sunday night was dinner at Dad's house as we usually do on Sunday. Monday it took forever to get home after work, because there had been some massive crash on the motorway, several cars involved, and I saw like 3 ambulances, 3 police cars and 2 fire trucks heading to the scene. So a large portion of my evening involved sitting in traffic because the road had been reduced from three lanes to one.
Tuesday night I had a manager's meeting after work, because Joo from Lambton Quay wanted to introduce the new contact lens ordering system she and the Lambton Quay staff had been trialling.
Then Wednesday night, I had originally been invited to go to the movies after work with a few people, but they ended up cancelling, but Taina had already come into town to meet me after work, so we ended up going to see Beauty and The Beast at Reading Cinemas in Wellington by ourselves.
Good movie, by the way. A lot like the animated version, but more songs. Also I do tend to just prefer live action to animated movies most of the time in general.
Thursday night and Friday were quiet-ish. But Saturday got busy, as we had lunch in Upper Hutt, at the house next door to Dad's house.
Dad's next door neighbours moved recently, and when Nick found out the house was for sale, he decided to buy it.
He doesn't intend to live there long. His plan is, after the Europe trip next month, he is going to go to the UK and stay there a while, try to get a job there and live there for a bit. So the idea is to own the house in Upper Hutt just to rent out, and also to use to sleep-out shed at the back of the house as storage for his stuff he can't take overseas.
He has actually found some tenants already, but they haven't moved in yet, so Nick is living there at the moment temporarily. Kind of weird, him living there, and Dad right next door.
But anyway, we had lunch there on Saturday, Grandma, and Aunty Helen, Uncle Nick and my young cousins all came around. We all ended up sticking around for most of the afternoon.
Then last night, Luke came over to me and Taina's place to hang out. He and Taina had decided on it last week, during Taina's drunken phone call. But it was cool to hang out, watch YouTube, and play some Jackbox Party Pack 2 on the PS3.
And now, Sunday has arrived, so of course it is back to work again for another week. And with the family reunion in Auckland coming up this weekend, and Taina's birthday the following weekend, and less than a month till the overseas trip, things look set to be keeping pretty busy for a while. But hey, at least life isn't boring.
weezieishness · Sun Apr 09, 2017 @ 11:30am · 0 Comments |
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