My morning visit to the hospital

I've kind of had it. I still have this low fever so I couldn't go to shul which was very upsetting, plus I'm supposed to do an 80 mile MS fundraising bike ride next weekend and this was the weekend I needed to ride 40-50 miles to get myself ready for it. Now I don't know what I'm going to do. There's a 45 mile version, or I could just say, oh well, this is gonna hurt and do the 80 miles anyway. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

In the advancement of waiting and seeing, I've been doing the waiting part for most of the day, waiting at the registration places at the hospital, waiting at the lab, waiting for the results, which apparently are not coming today.

My doctor rules out swine flu, since this clearly is not any kind of flu, so we're looking for things like mono, Lyme disease, hepatitis, random infections (the registration lady said 'well, I certainly hope you don't have any of these things,' which was sweet).

I've had mono before, but apparently you can get it again. I got it the first time at age 30, which I do not recommend. It's one of those things where the older you are when you get it the worse it is. I caught it 2 months after starting my fist job out of biz school. I was really really sick, like 104+ fever for 2 weeks and a sore throat so bad I had to take steroids for it, which I also do not recommend as a way to have a good time. Then another couple of weeks of just being regular sick. All told, I missed a month of work and I didn't have the stamina to work 12 hour days immediately when I returned. My boss never forgave me for this. They probably would have done me a favor if they'd just fired me then instead of torturing me for a year first, but then maybe I wouldn't have ended up at the place I worked next where I ended up meeting my wife. So you never know.

As for Lyme disease, I've been to Lyme, CT where it was invented by deer who were tired of being hunted and hit by cars and who conspired with the deer ticks to spread it. By the way, did you know that more people are killed by deer than almost every other kind of animal? Between Lyme disease and car crashes, only bees kill more people each year.

Infection? I dunno, the body's got lots of parts and as best I can tell, almost all of them can get infected.

And then, of course, it may just go away by itself.