Welcome to the psychedelic end of the rainbow. I ask that you pardon my incoherency and just roll with this for a day or so; it'll all make sense in a moment. This is me trying to make sense, and something tells me I'm not doing a good job of it.

I started feeling very strangely this afternoon; my throat felt like it was trying to close up on me. Then I was tired, very tired. I listened to the changing weather reports throughout the day. Snow? Sleet? Rain? Ice? No one seemed to know.After work, I went over to Heather's. She drove me to the surprisingly-empty mall, where I picked up a badly needed new pair of jeans (medium blue and utterly boring) and finished up all but one last gift on my Christmas shopping list.

Our next-to-last stop was Victoria's Secret. Suddenly I was warm. Very warm. I asked Heather if she felt the same way, and she shook her finger at me and told me that I wasn't getting sick. While she rang her purchases up I sat down in the chair provided and realized my head was swimming.

Not good, I thought. I knew what this meant.

We got back to the apartment. I wanted to sleep in the car on the short drive back. I got in the car and concentrated on paying attention to the roads and the sleet that was coming down. Walked in the door, and grabbed the thermometer. 100.7.

I drank some water and huddled under covers on the couch. I finally got so tired that I went through the shivering agony of changing clothes and then huddled under the covers. I shivered until the space under the covers was warm.

Two hours later, when Jeff came to bed, I was sweating. I wanted to throw the covers off. He handed me the thermometer; I stuck it under my tongue and handed it back. I was sure by that symptom that my fever was breaking. It was 101—three tenths in the wrong direction. He fed me more water and aspirin and then I muttered, "I'm getting out of bed. I'm way too warm."

So here I am, with the swimming, dizzy headache that only comes with medium-to-high fevers. I can't remember the last time I had this symptom. My neck is sore, my throat is sore, and I really really wish at this point that I could go back to sleep. I haven't used a cool cloth on my forehead in years, and suddenly this quasi-treatment feels better than anything else I've tried this evening.

Maybe my fever will break during the course of the night. I really need to be at work tomorrow. But if I'm still in this hazy fevered state tomorrow morning, I have no business driving over icy roads, much less attempting to do useful work for clients.