1/6/00

As you may have guessed based on my last entry and all those news reports about the current raging flu epidemic, I haven't written this week because I've been really, really sick. I was running a high fever for four days in a row...I've been coughing and sneezing and oozing and aching and generally feeling miserable.

I even took a day off from the lab yesterday. I always feel horribly guilty about missing work for any reason, even if I'm sick. I know it's bad to be out in the workplace spreading my germs around, but there's no way I'd be able to stay out for the entire duration of my illness anyway. So I took a lot of cold medicine and went in on Monday and Tuesday and worked all day. My brain wasn't working too well--it was taking me several minutes to solve simple math problems, but incredibly, everything I did seemed to come out OK.

But then yesterday, after my third miserable sleepless night in a row, I decided that I just couldn't do it. I sent an e-mail saying that I'd been stricken with the flu and wasn't coming in. I did go to class yesterday, and the professor whose lab I'm working in this quarter happened to be there. She seemed pretty understanding about my absence (possibly because I had a violent coughing fit in front of her which nicely illustrated just how very sick I was), but I still couldn't get over my horrible feelings of guilt.

This morning I woke up feeling a lot better and went back to the lab and got a bunch of work done. But then this afternoon, I was in my organ and tissue biology class when my virus showed another of its many facets--I was suddenly overcome with dizziness and nausea. I felt sure that I was either going to throw up or faint, so I walked out of class and headed for the bathroom. Luckily, the bathroom had an open window, so I stuck my head out of it and got some fresh air which made me feel a lot better, but not completely so.

(Heh. That reminds me of a funny but somewhat gross story from my childhood. I was 7 or 8 years old, and had some some sort of stomach ailment. I was sitting in the kitchen with my dad when I was overwhelmed by the urge to vomit, so I headed for the bathroom to do so. My dad asked me where I was going, so I explained that I was about to throw up. "Go outside and get some fresh air" he advised, "it'll make you feel better." I just wanted to go throw up, so I demurred and headed towards the bathroom, but my dad grabbed me, picked me up and carried me out to the garage. Then I threw up on the garage floor. My dad had to clean it up.)

Anyway, getting back to today, this time I didn't throw up. After getting some air and having a drink of water, I felt well enough to go back to class, but headed home straight afterwards even though I had something I was supposed to do in the lab. So I'm feeling really guilty again. I feel especially guilty because I feel OK now, but I can't do the experiment now because I need to ask someone where some of the reagents I need are. I know rationally that I shouldn't feel bad because I was in no shape to do any work this afternoon, and I can just do that experiment tomorrow. But I still feel guilty.

Incidentally, that class that I got sick in the middle of today was pretty interesting. It was actually a lab class where we were learning about techniques used in chicken embryology, so we got to poke holes in eggs and stuff. The people in that lab do all kinds of funky things to study how normal development occurs like moving embryos' body parts around. These kinds of genetics and development studies always make me think of the South Park genetic engineer guy and his monkey with four asses. Actually, in my genetics class we learned that people have made a fruitfly larva with two asses (instead of having a head, it had an additional tail end. Remarkably, it was able to survive for several days after birth!)

However, by far the most astonishing thing in the lab we were in today was the preserved head of a bizarre-looking mutant pig. The pig was born with two snouts, three jaws, three eyes and four sets of teeth (it wasn't genetically engineered or anything, it was just a naturally occurring mutation). The farmer to whom it belonged was going to sell it to a freak show, but then some animal rights organization intervened and adopted it. The woman who runs the lab we were in today is an oral surgeon who does research on craniofacial abnormalities, and she'd agreed to operate on the pig to try to make it more normal. But sadly, the pig died of pneumonia before she had a chance to bring it to San Francisco.

However, the animal rights organization decided to give her the pig's body. She'd originally planned to embalm and save the whole body, but it was a 300-pound pig, so they decided to just save the head.

So now, the head is the centerpiece of the lab's pig shrine. The head is encased in a glass jar surrounded by several stuffed pig toys, strings of prayer beads and a jar full of incense. (And no, the pig's head is not what made me feel sick this afternoon!)