I first noticed it Wednesday, just a slight tightness in my throat as I
was driving back home from New Orleans. The trip up to that point had taken me
about three hours, enough time for someone to have completed a round trip from
Houma to New Orleans and back to the city. My passenger side window was stuck
down, I had to leave to go back offshore at one AM, and I was kicking myself
for not finding a better way out of another emotional quagmire, so I didn’t
think a thing of it.
Thursday was taken up mostly with travel. I took acetaminophen for a
headache and spent the van ride to Texas in a sleep coma punctuated by buying
fruit juices. My throat was very tight, but I thought I was just a bit
dehydrated. On the boat ride out, I was unusually sea sick. I don’t have a lot of man-points by default,
and one of the places I work really hard on keeping them is the appearance of a
strong constitution (a word which, no matter how much of it you have, will
still leave you looking like a D&D geek if you actually use it in a
sentence). I spent most of the ride on the outside deck for the fresh air,
sitting on a storage locker with one arm draped awkwardly around a ladder so I
wouldn’t slide off the boat when we hit large waves. I got sunburnt on the
right side of my face and my right arm and soaked with spray, but I managed not
to lose my lunch.
Whenever I got off of the boat, hot, tired, and sore, I thought that it
was simply the effects of the ride out. I crashed in my rack and slept poorly
until that evening.
The living quarters are kept frigidly cold. For the most part, I’m
comfortable at a slightly higher temperature than most, and because this work
environment doesn’t play well to moderation, I end up living in a frigid,
deadly (yes, deadly) wasteland. That morning though, I wasn’t cold. I was a bit
chilly, but during my fitful sleep, I’d thrown aside my sheet and blanket. I’d
stumbled out of bed to the galley, nauseous. I thought that some greasy soup
with tomatoes and orange juice would help rehydrate me. I passed the medic, but
opted not to say anything; if I was sea sick or woefully dehydrated (the latter
of which had happened to me before. You should ask about that poetry class, by
the way), I could take care of it on my own without bothering him. If I threw up,
then I’d seek his help.
I took a cool shower, which was automatically upgraded to a warm shower
at no extra charge by my elevated temperature. When I got back to my room, I
curled up in my bed for another half hour before getting up to violently hurl
up greasy, tomatoey, orangey juice.
The medic was nice enough to put down his flan, head to the medic’s
office, conduct a physical examination which consisted exactly of asking
whether or not I was coughing (a bit) and if that cough was productive (no),
and gave me some DayQuil tablets, some Robitussin, and some NyQuil tablets for
later. He also suggested that if I felt nauseous, I should eat Captain’s
Wafers. He said that captains used to use them to keep them from getting
seasick in front of their crew. I’ve heard a lot of bullshit out here, so I
wasn’t sold on etymology, but I do love me some crunchy, tasty Captain’s
Wafers.
I puked up the DayQuil tablets almost immediately and spend the next
twelve hours of my shift slowly learning how a person falls out of love with a
crunchy, tasty snack food. I wasn’t just because I’d tasted them coming up, nor
because I’d tasted them coming back up so many
times, no sir. It was because they did work, mostly, but at the cost of eating
enough of them that I genuinely got conventionally,
buying-your-first-bag-of-candy-because-you’re-a-grown-up-now sick of having
them in and around my mouth. And boy, when they didn’t fight back that wave of nausea, I got a solid, compacted train of reprocessed Captain’s Wafers in
return for my troubles.
How I managed to get past day one of my hitch is a mystery. My usually
porous memory was especially hard-pressed to remember that day. I remember
distinctly falling asleep with my face in the seat of my chair, but the only
people who caught me actually dozing were the Filipinos who, and they’re pretty
cool (though I feel like I’m a Ricky Gervais from The Office type character to
them). My relief assures me that I actually did an okay job and nothing got
fucked up though, so that’s good. [1]
That night I slept poorly. My throat was too sore for me to swallow any
spit autonomically and given the choices between waking up every few
minutes/hours to (paaainfully) swallow or to simply drool on my pillow and
pretend it never happened in the morning, I chose the former. It was a choice
made entirely from pride, and it wasn’t a particularly wise or reasonable one,
but one performs according to one’s nature.
The next day, my condition had improved considerably better, it felt
like my throat was a tiny tube covered in razor blades. I couldn’t tell if it
was a new condition, or simply one that I’d had yesterday, but in my litany of
ailments simply couldn’t give polite attention to. I ate only yogurt and drank
glasses of milk with ice then. Doing anything that required more than talking
very lowly or walking left me short of breath. I won’t ascribe any luck to the
fact that though I had tried to keep knowledge of my condition confined to my
fellow clerk and the medic, others had found out about it. It was, however,
quite lucky they saw this as a reason to feel some degree of sympathy instead
of circling me like velociraptors around a wounded brontosaurus, separated from
the herd.
When I got off shift on the second day, I asked my medic about
something for my throat. He examined my throat with one of those little lights
and felt my swollen lymph nodes to see just what was going in and asked about
my other conditions. LOL, just kidding. He said if I got any worse, they’d have
to send me in. I told him that my sore throat was really my only problem now,
so he suggested gargling with salt water and gave me another DayQuil/NightQuil
set.
That night’s sleep wasn’t too great either.
Doing better now though. My throat’s still a bit sore, but I’m eating
(mostly) solid food again, and I even had a popsicle. I used the stick as a
tongue depressor and with my maglight and a mirror I looked at my mouth. It’s
pretty red, and I’ve even got a white spot on the left side of the roof of my
mouth (towards the back, where it gets mushy).
Doesn’t hurt when I poke it
though, so I’m feelin’ pretty good about that.
---
[1]With, of course, the caveat that much of what I do is to compile and
distribute written records of things that we reference later in case something
goes wrong, so if I did screw something up it might be a few months to a year
when we need it for legal reasons that we realize I did. Ha-ha!
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