Normally I don’t like to turn down a reason to spend a couple of days in my sweatpants watching television, but I could have done without the fever.
I needed to take a couple of days off from work recently when some virus knocked me down. The whole thing started as an annoying cough with sinus congestion. I never saw the fever and lethargy coming.
I hopped in the car to head for work one morning and realized I had made a tragic mistake about 15 minutes into my commute. Unfortunately, I had a project due that day and had no way of accessing the information from home.
Nobody like the person who comes into work when they should be resting at home, so I got in and out of the office as fast as I could. I really needed to just tie up a few loose ends, which made it possible for me to be home watching television in bed by noon.
At first, I didn’t think I had a fever. I watched some TV and took a nap. When I woke up, I felt a little hot, but just attributed it to the electric blanket. So I turned the blanket down. Then I turned it off. Then I realized I had to get out of bed and find the thermometer.
Strangely, the presence of a fever made me feel better. I could really justify my laziness once I saw triple digits on the readout. I also made sure to do the smartest thing I could – I checked my temperature approximately 437 times the rest of the day.
My wife finally busted me on this in the evening, after the first time I had a normal temperature. I told her I just wanted to check the accuracy of the previous reading less than 10 minutes prior. What she didn’t know is that I pretty much averaged 10 minutes between readings much of the day.
I had a good reason for some of this. My daughter had her middle school chorus concert that night. I hated to miss it and felt that if I didn’t have a fever by the time we needed to leave the house, I could justify attending.
The more I checked my temperature, my warped mind concluded, the better chance of getting a normal reading. Law of averages and everything, right?
Wrong. I barely dropped below 100 until they had returned home after the concert, which is when I got busted for obsessively checking my temperature. Part of me wonders if I would have felt better sooner if I didn’t continually check on my fever, but I guess we will never know.
I felt bad about missing the concert, but probably would have done more damage if I had gone. In the end, I caught up on a lot of my favorite TV shows and returned to work by the end of the week.
That’s when I really needed to check my temperature. I didn’t need long to realize, despite the fact that I love my job, sitting in bed watching television beats working any day of the week even if the thermometer reads over 100 the whole time.