My yesterday, in review:

5:30 AM: Get out of bed, go to work.
6:30 AM: Become vilely, graphically, and messily ill. Attempt to work anyway.
9:00 AM: Determine that this is absolutely not working. Go home.
10:30 AM: Go to bed.
3:30 PM: Wake up.
5:00 PM: Take some Tylenol, go back to bed.
8:30 PM: Wake up.
11:15 PM: Go back to bed.

I woke up at eight o'clock this morning with the distinct feeling that I had somehow traded Friday to the fairies for a handful of magic beans and a plush velociraptor. At least I like the plush velociraptor.

On the plus side, for all that I now have that faintly draggy 'you slept too much, you moron' feeling, combined with a double to-do list -- since I did basically nothing yesterday, and my average day's to-do is between fifteen and fifty items -- I no longer seem to be sick. It may just be that my body figured out that if it hit me hard enough, I'd lay down already. The possibility must be admitted to exist.

This is totally the way to make me miss my word count goals for a day. Make me too damn sick to die.

Bleargh.

Starting yesterday morning, I began to present the exact same symptoms that I was presenting this time last week. That's right: reinfection has been achieved. Yippee! Only wait...no. Not yippee. Anti-yippee. This is the dark reflection of yippee, lurking in the tenebrous corners of the universe, waiting to destroy my enjoyment of everything.

I literally sat down with a pen and paper, made a list of everything I encountered during my probable infection period (assuming a two- to three-day incubation, which is roughly average for this sort of virus), and proceeded to check off the things that I encountered during the period where I didn't get sick. Like John Snow on his quest for the Broad Street pump, I was on a quest for a viral reservoir! Only he wasn't, y'know, dying of cholera while he was looking for the thing that caused all that cholera. I am not entirely happy with my needing to catch the virus to know I needed to find it.

The probable culprit? The toothbrush I keep in Kate and GP's bathroom for my Thursday night sleepovers. Kate has thrown it away, and we'll be testing the theory when I go to house-sit for them (starting tomorrow night). So I feel very much like a kick-ass epidemiologist, wiping out threats everywhere that she goes. Except for the part where, oh, yeah, I'm still sick. I had to go to work today, since it's already a short week, and literally nearly passed out at my desk several times. I feel like death warmed over. I look like death warmed over. The Four Horsemen all want my number. Pestilence called me 'a real hottie.'

If this is my last entry, blame the microbes.

Well, I'm finally feeling well enough to return to work, even though it means hauling my little blonde butt out of bed at 5:15 AM. The cats are, to put it bluntly, not amused. Lilly really has issues with the fact that my taking sick time doesn't mean I'm planning on staying home with her forever and always, amen. This is because Lilly is a freak.

I'm better than I was, although not one hundred percent; I was correct in assuming that my failure to develop a proper fever meant that I wasn't dealing with strep, and instead had 'just' a sort throat. There's very little 'just' about losing the capacity to swallow, but I'll take what I can get when it keeps me off the magic antibiotic happy juice. That stuff just knocks me out of the game for as long as it's in my system. NO LOGIC ALLOWED.

I've put my unexpected time away from work to good use, doing a lot of editing, a lot of inking, and a lot of catching up on my stock-piled television. I've now seen the entire first season of ReGenesis, aka 'Canadian television is trying to buy my love, and I think it just might be for sale.' Look, any show that's willing to give me smallbox-Marburg chimera diseases (I love chimera diseases) and have the balls to go for the Spanish flu? That show is basically going to own me for as long as it likes. Sadly, ReGenesis only wants to own me for four seasons. Alas, Babylon.

So now that I'm emerging from my viral hibernation, what have I missed? Assume that the world was just trundling on without me for the past three days.

Well, I'm home sick today, currently presenting two out of the five primary symptoms of streptococcal sore throat. (Quoth my mother, "Honey, you are the only person I know who says 'Mommy, I've got strep' by announcing that you're presenting primary symptoms of something I can't pronounce.") Big fun for the whole family! For the morbidly curious, I'm feeling deeply unwell, have marked swelling of the throat and tonsils, difficulty swallowing, tender lymph nodes, and so much red inflammation that I look like one of my own manuscripts post-editing pass. Not much fun.

In an effort to make myself feel better, I've been catching up on some of the television that's been building up while I was off doing other things, like writing, editing, and attempting to have a life. Well, let's see. How about The Eleventh Hour? Crazy science always makes me feel better! Yeah! And this episode is about...

...smallpox getting loose in Philadelphia. Right. Well, now that I'm sick and deeply disturbed, what about watching some ReGenesis? Originally created for Canadian television, ReGenesis really seems to have been created with me in mind, since it's sort of a crazy cross between Numb3rs and House, only instead of fighting either crime or weird medicine, they fight genetic crime and monstrosities of science. ReGenesis will make me feel better! And the first episode of season one is about...

...a horrible hybrid of camel pox and Ebola getting loose in Canada. Right.

I'm going back to bed.

I've been sick for over a week now. There have been a few flashes of feeling better, but they've been short-lived, and always seem to be followed by things like last night, where I woke up at one o'clock in the morning feeling like I'd been gargling flesh-eating alien spiders. (I wasn't. At least, I don't think I was. If I'm wrong, I suppose we'll find out when they hatch. Also, it should be noted that Brooke supports my theory that alien spiders are responsible for many of the ills of mankind, although this may be because she thinks it's cool. She's right.)

Sadly, the ongoing construction of a tiny viral empire inside my body has left me with the laser-like focus of an eight-week-old cocker spaniel puppy. I can focus on small things, like peeling an egg or inking a single line. Larger things, like folding my laundry or excavating the bedroom floor? Not so much. My room has achieved a level of trashed previously known only in myth and legend. I simply lack the energy to deal with it. All I've eaten today is a cup of sugar-free Jello and some egg whites, because nothing else has any real interest in staying down. I am, in short, being punished for my sins by an angry plague-based god.

Despite my illness, I've been industriously processing edits, which is good, since otherwise, I think they would crush me beneath their weight. I think there may be a ground war over my opinions on comma usage sometime soon. I support this notion, because it would be funny. We've hit the stage where they're almost entirely pedantic things, like 'you have broken another obscure rule of grammar whose existence you never really considered before, but which will be used to sentence you to an eternity of torment if you don't fix it right now' and 'you spelled 'Rayseline' wrong.' This is the most pleasant stage of editing. The stage where I can actually fix things with relative ease.

I managed to get a good start on one of the drop-in chapters for Newsflesh on Friday, to my surprise and delight. Georgia Mason is one of the easiest point-of-view characters I've ever worked with -- most of them take a few pages or even a chapter to come all the way 'on', but she was there, and absolutely herself, from the very first paragraph. She's not the easiest person to live with, mind you, but she's an absolute ball to write for. Even if I do need to regularly restrain myself from going off on six-page rants about the state of virological research in her version of modern America. Depending on the density of editing to be done, I may be able to finish the first drop-in chapter tonight, get it all integrated with the rest of the text, and start in on drop-in chapter number two. Progress is exciting!

Of course, it's also likely that I'm going to crawl home tonight, fall on my head, and not acknowledge the world again until Tuesday morning. Because Martian Death Flu is also exciting.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee.