05/18/2018

I woke up to the sore back in the early morning around 5 am on Friday, tossing from side to side on the bed and could not go back to sleep. I knew something was not right. After lying there for an hour more, I got up for a thermometer. It was 37.8C. I boiled myself a pot of hot water and decided to call sick for the day. The temperature quickly shot up to 39.3C and then 39.6C, and the feet was cold. A pot of water down the throat did not produce any urine. The sore continued and worsened, and the headache felt like exploding.  I felt so weak as if my strength was like being drained, vaporing into the air.

I made a phone call right after 9am and was told that the doctor was out of office.

I wanted to go to sleep but could not. I wanted to divert my attention by watching TV in the bedroom, but sitting up was difficult. So I listened to a TV documentary with my eyes closed. Soon the sound from the TV was like floating, and I dozed off into a short nap. When I woke up, the temperature retreated to 38C, and my feet and body regained some warmth. I started to drink more water like a cow again, hoping the temperature would ebb down the road to the normal. It was back to 38.7C in the afternoon, and the chill came back. I went downstairs for my insurance card and called the insurance company for the nearest Urgent care in the network. I was suggested to go after 5 pm for the policy requirement. Weak and headache then, I could barely drive myself there, but to wait for my husband to get off work.

I finally saw the UC nurse after 7 pm, but did not take the antibiotics as prescribed. Instead, I went to sleep early after eating some hot soup. To my great relief and delight, the fever was miraculously gone the next morning when I woke up. 

05/20/2018

A young college girl from the east coast stopped by on her way back to China. So the next day, a cloudy Sunday, when it was drizzling in the early morning, we found ourselves on the highway heading to the beach, a planned destination regardless of the weather.

As expected, it was not a good day for beach sightseeing. The sea without sun was like a beauty shrouded in dark gray veil. The sea surface was leaden, so was the sky.  However this did not dampen the girl’s mood, who was in high spirits talking to us about everything under the ‘sun’. As a daughter of a former student in my first- year teaching almost 30 years ago, she and I were only acquainted through a picture or two from Wechat.  But she won my heart the first night when we picked her up, frank and youthful, full of her own ideas.

From the conversation, it looked like her first-year college life turned out to be both exciting and challenging. The pimple outbreak all over her face was a testament to the stresses she had over the final.  In the middle of the conversation, she told a story of her vacating the dorm for the summer, and how to save the $30 or more of buying moving boxes from Amazon, she went from stores to stores, asking for used packing boxes, by phone and in person. The process was a pain, and what she learnt from it was way over the saved $30 bucks. I guess, life is all about learning experience, not just from the book but from the life itself.

I mentioned her in one of my former posts. She is the girl whose passion in philosophy persists, and would have majored in philosophy, had it not been pressured by the parents. She debated hotly with my husband about philosophy, religion and politics, topics of which I know little.  What impressed me most is her English, when good words flowed out of her mouth incessantly. When we were in a restaurant ordering food, her vocabulary and knowledge about the food names surpassed me (she is a cuisine lover by the way). She was beaming with the confidence when conversing with the waitress. She made me think of my daughter, and I subconsciously compared them, a girl grown up in China versus a girl raised in America.