On Sunday I came home from church we’d visited with a lingering headache and exhaustion. I had seen the “super flu” mentioned in the news already and assumed it was a normal flu, albeit much more contagious, with the name merely being a bit of journalistic flourish. It really didn’t occur to me I could be sick (everyone I had talked to seemed really healthy), so I took a nap for several hours and thought all was well.
Monday came around and with it all the aches, chills, and coughing of illness. I was severely disappointed but tried to reason with myself that a day or two of fever was no big deal and would soon be over. My fever kept going up and down across Monday and then into Tuesday, which became worrying, since I hadn’t left my bed for any length of time and had been doing all the usual things to try to lower my temperature. My fatigue intensified, to the point everything became overwhelming—even reading, sitting up, or just having a small light in the room.
Wednesday was when things really hit the fan. I still had a fever, and my mental state was a mess. I won’t say I have it all together on a good day, but internally I really was a different (angry, irrational) person on Wednesday. It seemed to come out of nowhere and was very troubling. I don’t know if I could have taken another day of that, so thankfully by Thursday morning, my fever had subsided, and by midday, my real personality snapped back into place.
These last two days I’ve been able to get up and do basic things, though I’m still dealing with a bad cough, sore throat, and general weakness. I have gotten by easily compared with some others, but this has certainly been the worst illness of the five (? I’m losing track) I’ve had since I’ve moved, and is up there with COVID for the worst in the last five years. (And for those curious—no, I did not get the flu vaccine, though I have nothing against it.) What I will say is, it was probably the “best” time to get sick (if there can be one) because we had just set up all our new furniture and are 2 weeks away from traveling to visit family.
Early on Monday, when I still had more energy, I did manage to finish My Ántonia. That must be added to my highlights of the year. And I finished Time Shelter as well, the Bulgarian choice for the Reading the World challenge. I liked the first half very much and the second half not as much.
I’ll be starting a few books this week, more to get a head start on next year’s reading than anything. I discovered Amazon Prime has an ebook library, so I will be commencing the Narnia reread by continuing on with LWW. And for an online book club, I’ll be picking up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, which has been on my TBR since time immemorial. Mr H is reading The Epic of Gilgamesh to me, and we are reading The Tragedy of Man (a Hungarian classic) together. And the next stop for Reading the World is Poland with a gentle novel called Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk.
Classics Considered 
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