I'm not dead yet, so I know it isn't Meningitis. I've had full body aches for the past two days. Aches isn't even the correct term- every major part of my body has dull stabby pains running through it. As well as this, I've been dizzy and nauseated on and off.
Around here, you can't be sick without a doctor's note, but everyone knows there is a difference between being sick and just not being able to go to class. A trip to the Death Centre would go something like this.
"Huh, yeah, sounds like you don't feel well."
Really!?
And then there would be a choice.
A) "Well, go home and rest and if you don't feel better in a day or so come back."
OR
B) "Well, get this antibiotic perscription filled, take those for ten days, and if you don't feel better in a day or so come back."
Everyone who makes the three block walk out to the Death Centre with any "I feel too sick to go to class but don't have any major illness" sort of feeling gets the same thing.
Why is everyone so worried that there is no real cure for cancer when medicine can't really work out why somethimes the average person wakes up in the morning feeling like absolute shit? It's no surprise about the cancer, really, given the other "advances".
I suppose part of the problem with me is that I am completely paranoid about any kind of medicinal drugs. I will not take acetaminophen unless I am on the verge of death. Today doesn't count for that: I have to be unable to talk or breathe or doubled over in pain. I'm not doubled over, I just can't make any sudden moves, or walk very far.
This wouldn't matter all that much except that I have a group project. I'm in a class devoted to theatrical group projects. Basically, it is a class in which you re-learn how much you hate everyone in the department and question why you're in theatre anyway. It is the second most hated class in the department, right after the orientation class all incoming students have to take and right before any class taught by Leonard.
Leonard caught both generations of heavy pot smoking, the 50's and the 60's. His brain is totally fried, which might not be so bad except that he is also naturally anal retentive. In lectures he repeats his every sentence three or four times very very slowly and carefully in a slightly different way each time so that he has a chance of remembering what he said.
He has to schedule meetings with everyone for even an exchange of three sentences or he won't even recall that he was spoken to. Aren't professors with tenure great?
Every now and then Stage Director Mary will go into a bout of feeling sorry for him and say that it's because he has nothing to do but go home at night and sit with his cat and think about all sorts of things that could go wrong.