My thoughts this week have been dark ones. My frustration with suddenly losing my job has been compounded with my frustration about my poor health since late November / early December.

It's pointless to rehash things that cannot be undone or changed. But I have spent a lot of time, especially in this past week, mulling over some things. We have a euphemism here in the States that we call "a moment of clarity."

Mine, I think, came in the midst of a 101-degree fever while lying in a hospital room. It consisted of a very simple thought that has stayed in my waking hours and my dreams ever since that moment:"If you do not find the courage to change your life, you will die before your thirty-fifth birthday."

I've only mentioned this to one person so far. It troubled me enough that I held it to myself for a while, trying to understand, trying not to let on to other people that something had happened that both confused and frightened me.

Welcome to my rambling mind.

(I can already see Sean settling in for a good laugh with this entry. He apparently gets a kick out of my ramblings when I'm feverish, and I'm betting this one's gonna be a classic.)

Hi. My name is Amy, and I seem to have a major problem staying well this winter.

I appear to have caught the same stomach bug that Heather caught. So much for my promise of a Wednesday night update—I spent most of Wednesday night praying to the porcelain god. It got bad enough (fever of 101, bits of blood coming up) that we got to make an emergency visit to the hospital in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

We got there, and they did some tests on me to determine how dehydrated I was. When lying down, my heart rate was very fast and my blood pressure was around 110/80. When I stood up, my heart rate accelerated even more (to somewhere around 135 bpm?), but my blood pressure dropped to 90/60.The end result: IV time.

My updates over the next 2-3 days are likely to be sporadic at best. I am halfway through converting my site from Blogger to Greymatter, but I've come to the part of the conversion that is most difficult—the seven months' worth of archived journal entries.

I told Jeff on the way home today that it felt like Tuesday. Most of this week vanished in a combination of sleep and fever. But I have answers now.

Jeff wasn't able to go in to work at his usual time this morning; the truck just wasn't able to make it up the ice-covered hills this morning. So he came home to me sitting in my overly-plush terry bathrobe. We talked. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it to the doctor's office because of the ice.

He offered to check my throat to see if he could see anything. In retrospect, it bothers me that neither of us thought to do this sooner. After a couple of mishaps and me nearly gagging on a soup spoon, Jeff says, essentially, "What are these white spots on the back of your throat?"

It certainly seems like I've written this entry before.

Kat tells me that my feverish and slightly nonsensical journal entries from this week are greatly amusing Sean. Just think, Sean—you could be here, putting up with my grumpy, feverish, utterly charming self in person, but instead you're in snowy Atlanta.

(Please raise your hand if you find that statement to be as utterly screwed up as I do.)

Basically, it's the same damn rigmarole that I've been living with since Monday evening. Sore throat, stiff neck, fluctuating fever, exhaustion. Blah blah lah dee frickin' blah blah blah. Hey, at least the fever makes me easy to entertain…not only do I have the attention span of a goldfish, but my cats find me equally as fascinating.