Weekend Blast from the Past

I got back from Japan on Monday with no jetlag (hooray!), but before I could even finish my recap post for you all, I got suddenly sick on Tuesday night with a high fever (101 – especially high given that my temperature is usually low and in the 97s). In amusing news, after having a hard time picking out some good medicine at the drugstore (they were all either flu or just fever, but nothing about my swollen throat), I Googled my very generic symptoms and found a Yahoo Answers post that was absolutely hilarious.

Q: I am a 20 year old female and two days ago I woke up with swollen glands and a really bad sore throat. Later on that day it progressed to chills and a fever. I couldn’t sleep at all the first night as I had such a bad sore throat and I kept going back and forth from really bad chills to night sweats. I stayed in bed for more of the 2nd day although when I did need to get up I felt really really heavy and I would get very nauseous. I tried to go to a walk in clinic today (being the 3rd day) but the wait was over two hours and I just couldn’t sit feeling the way I do. Any thought on what it could be? And ideas on how to remedy it?

A: It’s nearly impossible for anyone to find an accurate diagnosis online, but one thing that strikes me about your symptoms is that they are all very common signs of HIV infection. Don’t let this worry you, though, because if you surf the web a little you will find that every set of symptoms can be attributed to a broad range of disease & infections. Still, if you haven’t been tested for HIV within the past six months & you’ve put yourself at risk for infection, I would recommend getting yourself tested. Good luck to you and I hope you’re feeling better.

Just goes to show how useless and hypochondria-inducing it is to use Google as a substitute for a doctor! Luckily, my fever went down after just one day of Tylenol, and while I developed the sniffles a day later, I seem to be better for the most part – or at least better enough to function like a normal human being, do work, and have some fun this weekend. While I kept the drinking fairly light for the most part, I still had a great time.

Friday night, I went bowling with some running friends to celebrate their completion of a 24 hour race (they did 100 miles!). I hadn’t been bowling in a while, and it’s one of those activities that always reminds me of childhood (though I don’t know why that is exactly, since I didn’t bowl much when I was a kid). After bowling, I was trying to meet up with a girlfriend and ended up walking over 3 miles around the Upper West Side – between that and the bowling, not bad for unintended exercise!

After a nice brunch with a girlfriend on Saturday afternoon, Saturday night began with a date to this awesome Cuban restaurant where they serve you rum punch in silver soup tureens and you drink it out of china teacups. Post-date, I responded to a text from someone from high school who out of the blue texted everyone he knew was in New York City and suggested catching up over a drink. Turns out that I’m the only adventurous/not-too-busy one, as I was the only one responded and came out. Noah is a firefighter who works not far from where I am on the UWS, and while we weren’t really friends in high school (more of acquaintances), we had a blast and I think he’s going to become a friend now. Totally unexpected, but totally great.

After recently reading and loving Alexandra Robbins’ The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, I couldn’t resist asking Noah a bit about how I was perceived in high school. I always thought of myself as pretty much the nerdiest kid around, but he surprised me by telling me that most people considered me a cool floater, and not as firmly a nerd as I had thought. In fact, he told me that I was really cool, and that consensus among the guys was that I was pretty hot. What???? Totally floored me on that one, but it was neat to hear that I was more respected/liked/admired than my loser self remembers 🙂

On Sunday after a nice long sleep in, I headed up to Westchester for a pool party with a bunch of my girlfriends. Though it ended up being a bit rainy and not nearly as hot as the Heatpocalypse we’ve been dealing with for the last week, we had a ball – it was so great to catch up with girlfriends in such a relaxed way! I hadn’t been to a pool party like that probably since high school, and it was just so carefree and fun and different than my usual NYC activities.

Overall, a great weekend and terrific blast from the past. Sometimes I think it’s great to look back and see how far you’ve come – or even that things weren’t quite the way you perceived them to be at the time. And then it’s also nice to go back to some old activities you haven’t done in a while and remember how fun they are 🙂 Next up – perhaps the roller skating rink when I visit Albany for a wedding in two weeks?