I'll take the mystery illness behind door number three, PatSo the night before I leave for Illinois, I come down with a 101.7 fever. Perhaps it's just a bug, and I'll feel fine tomorrow, I think. The fever breaks during the night, and I feel fine when I get up at 4 am to catch my flight. I feel fine when my friend and her baby pick me up at the airport. We spend the morning together, and I feel fine. But by the time we get to Belvidere, I'm feeling less than stellar. Perhaps I'm just tired and need to take a nap. I know I'm just fooling myself. I take my temperature. Over 101 again. Damn. I take more Advil. I try to sleep. My dad gets home, and I try to convince him that I'm fine even though I have a fever. I try soaking in a cool bath, but my fever goes up instead of down. 102.5 is enough to worry even me, the girl determined that she can't possibily be sick on her vacation. The worry wart side of me starts to take over. The only other thing that's wrong is that my rib has been hurting more lately. Maybe it's worse than I thought, and it's getting infected and I'm really in grave danger. This is not true. But maybe I have strep throat or something because of all the cold weather.
So my dad drives me to the immediate care clinic in Rockford. I wait for an hour to get into an exam room. A nurse takes my temperature. Down to 101. I sit in a hospital gown for another hour waiting for the doctor to see me. He looks at my throat. (It's a little red.) He pokes at my side. He decides to do a strep test and a chest x-ray, just in case. Apparently, a cracked rib can lead to pneumonia but I don't have any other symptoms, so I'm probably fine. So I let the nurses stick a cotton swab down my throat. I contort myself into funny positions and wear a very fetching lead-lined skirt for the chest x-ray. I wait more. Finally, the doctor comes back and tells me that nothing's wrong with me. It's probably just a virus. I just have a fever and should drink lots of fluids and take some Advil. The fever was gone by morning, and I was just left with a scratchy throat. So at least I had three mostly illness-free days left to my vacation.
So for the record. This should take care of the mystery illness of the month.
All other lurking physical misfortunes, you're just going to have to back off and wait your turn.The Grand Tour of O'HareSo I left my parent's house yesteraday at 4:30 pm to catch at 5:05 bus to O'Hare for my 8:30 flight to LaGuardia. I'd get home really late, but it would be worth it have most of the day to spend with people. I get to O'Hare a little before 7 only to discover after 45 minutes of waiting in line that all flights to the Northeast have been cancelled for the rest of the night. The airline rebooks me for the next available flight. 3 pm the next afternoon. Well, crap.
So I call my parents and get back on the bus to Rockford. I go right to sleep when I get home at 10. I get up at 3 am after an oh-so-refreshing five hours of sleep to catch a 3:40 am bus back to O'Hare. I'm being optomistic and hoping I'll be able to fly stand-by on the 6 am flight. I get to the airport at 4:45-ish. I check in stand-by. I go to gate H9 and wait. I check on flights to Newark, but that situation is even worse because they've cancelled some of the morning flights, too. So I join the larger roaming crowd of stand-by hopefuls trying to get to LaGuardia. At least there's a flight once an hour. They keep rolling over the stand-by list (only one or two people get on each time) as we all move from H9 to L4 to K4 to K8 to H6 to H9 to H13 to L1 to H10. We only skip concourse G. I assume that could only be because American doesn't use it. At one point they announce that there are 120 people on the stand-by list. Oh, and did they mention that all the flights are overbooked? Some where around the 10 o'clock flight, I call my boss and accept the fact that I am not going to make it out to New Jersey today, even for a half day. This means I'm using a vacation day to sit around in an airport. I make the best of it and buy really indulgent nachos at the food court for lunch and a Starbucks brownie for dessert and a new book to read on the plane.
I finally give up around 1:30 and just go check in for my 3 pm flight. I have a boarding pass. It feels like a golden ticket. We board. We taxi. I'm on my way. It feels satisfying. But then I notice we've been taxiing for an a rather long time. We stop. The captain announces that we are being held on the ground for 45 minutes. The man next to me says it's probably the weather. Bad storms in New York tonight, too, he insists. Noooo! I've been very Zen all day, but this almost brings me to tears. I heard about people who were stuck waiting for hours on the runway before the flights got cancelled. I could not handle doing this all over again tomorrow. Thankfully, after half an hour we get the go-ahead to take off. It must have just been delays at LGuardia from all the back-up. We land in New York. The line for taxis is short. I consider taking the bus to the subway but decide I've done enough waiting for one day, thank you very much. I finally roll into my apartment at 7:30 pm. A mere 26 hours after I original started my journey.
Just a warning. If anything like this happens the next time I fly, I might just stay in Ireland indstead.
There were good things too-catching up with friends I hadn't seen in way too long
-seeing my parents
-the Boone County Fair!
-elephant ears!
