But I did not know that for sure in the morning. With sniffles, sneezes, sore throat and a small headache, not to mention that my pulse went way up when I did anything harder than amble across the floor.  As long as I was at rest, it was fine though.  In any case, I decided to give it a day and see. If the temperature grew into a real fever, I would drop off work for the duration, otherwise get back the next day.

As it happens, I got rather better over the day, so it wasn’t the flu this time.  Having been sneezed at during our gathering last week, and later in the supermarket, I did not want to pass it on until I was sure.

My boss let me work from home. (I would probably have done so anyway, since there were files to merge, my favorite work activity. But I would not have been paid for it. On the other hand, a sickday would have paid better, since there were not files and mail enough for a full day.)

This is the second Monday off in a month or less.  I know this is not uncommon here in Norway, where drinking is concentrated to the weekends.  In my case that’s obviously not the reason – I forget to buy alcohol, and with a reasonable amount of meditation I probably don’t need it anyway. Small quantities of alcohol correlates statistically with less heart and circulatory problems and a moderately longer lifespan, but it is not entirely clear that this comes from the alcohol or whether it is part of a general lifestyle of moderation.  Anyway, in my case there must be another reason, and I suspect exercise.  Having the day off, I tend to exercise a good deal more.  When I return from work, I feel tired, even if my work there is almost exclusively for the brain.

The days pass,  and it gets a little easier to live with the super hemorrhoid.  And then today, a few times, something more sinister happens.  Suddenly there is a twitch of pain in the hemorrhoids, and immediately a knife-sharp pain of great magnitude stabs the FRONT of my belly, on the same side (slightly right of center), above the belt but below the thoracic diaphragm.

(Do people really say “diaphragm”?  An ordinary thing needs a more ordinary name. In Norwegian we refer to the sheet of muscle below the lungs as “mellomgolv”, middle floor or in-between floor. I can’t see people using the same word for the essential breathing muscle and a contraceptive, but then again English is a weird language spoken by weird people.)

Anyway, I survived, at least this far.  But it was out of the ordinary painful, although it only lasted for less than a second.  Instinctively I  jumped out of my current position, and the pain both here and there ceased immediately, leaving only a cold, numb echo along the front of my belly, running vaguely vertically.

Since it only happens when I sit on reasonably full bowels and since it can be felt both in front (most intensely) and behind (less so), I ass-sume it to be an effect of the rhoids. If not, I would just as well have guessed kidney sand – I have heard that sudden, extreme pain can happen when a grain is moving down through the urinary tract, which probably is somewhere around there? But that goes nowhere near the anus at any time, quite the opposite.

Anyway, the illness is still fascinating for me, although I bet it is a lot less interesting for everyone else.

Unfortunately it also means I can’t mow the lawn, and it is growing like crazy in the ever changing sun and rain of the last week.  If I have to stay off it for another week, it will be seriously hairy, and the landlord will NOT be pleased.  As if this wasn’t problematic enough to begin with. It was from mowing while weak from fever that I got this in the first place, after all.  I am not ready to risk making it even much worse by trying to mow again until reasonably healed.

OK, I guess I have been a lot like this lately.  Perhaps an emergency brake was needed. It is still a pain in the ass, though. Literally.

This morning I felt better from the hemorrhoids. Not like they were gone or anything, but bearable. I decided against going to the city to look for some topical medication. (Subconsciously it may have played a role that going to the city would mean sitting on a hard  bus seat for half an hour…) Anyway, I probably made a mistake. It’s evening now, and the pain has returned to a level similar to yesterday. Perhaps not quite as bad, or perhaps I’m getting used to it.

In any case, the pain makes it impractical for me to sit for a long time, and especially in the position I normally use when I type or play. So if I had planned to spend most of the day playing City of Heroes, forget that. (That would at the face of it seem a reasonable plan, because it is currently “double XP weekend” in the game, an event that happens only a few times a year and draws a lot of players.

(Incidentally, I have been dictating this entry so far, but I am not kidding when I say I usually don’t speak anymore. My throat has more or less run out by now!)

I have been playing a bit, but I’m not really in the mood. Not just because the sitting is a pain in the ass, but I also occasionally feel queasy and begin shivering for a while. My heart is also beating faster then. But the temperature only goes up by about half a degree Celsius, then it stops, and a bit later I begin sweating and feel better. I am not sure whether or not this is related to the hemorrhoids. From what I have been reading (and I have been reading quite a bit last night) hemorrhoids are almost never life-threatening. If they could actually get infected, you’d think they would be a cause for much more concern. Anyway! The feeling is not conductive to lighthearted gaming.

The mood is more suitable to contemplate “the shortness of life, the certainty of death and the length of eternity”. (That was a favorite phrase in the good old days of the Christian Church. Actually, I am not sure eternity even has length or duration. I mean, it is always eternity! Even now. We just don’t notice.)

I have been told that this was the true purpose of the Sabbath, to make room in time to become aware of eternity. By setting aside a day of sacred time, people got their break from the endless march of seemingly important everyday events and got closer to timelessness. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But it is probably just a few scattered mystics here and there who perceive it that way. I mean, Christians used to have the Sunday as a holy day, although they did not enforce it quite as strictly. But for 45 years I never heard anyone talk about eternity as anything other than an infinitely long duration of time. Certainly not as something that is always waiting just outside our reach, waiting for us to invite it into time.

Then again, perhaps you have to enforce the Sabbath fiercely for it to work? Now that Sunday is just a day off, it is so easy to just fill it with all kinds of fun stuff. Inviting the restlessness of the rest of the week into the day of rest of the week, to coin a pun. Instead of inviting the opposite, the timelessness that encloses time, which is at the beginning of time and at the end of time and at the present moment, like the sky that is always above us every time we stop and look up, no matter where on the road we are. The only moment that is quite real is now. Well, that’s not quite right: Every moment is real, but you can only access one at a time. And every time we do that, every time we stop and look up (even metaphorically), time and eternity meet.

But usually we don’t stop, we just keep running,  even just for fun.  We’ll get to eternity sooner or later anyway, of course, but will we be at home there?  I wonder.  I don’t feel very at home with eternity right now, let me tell you.

I had expected this to be a pretty good day.  The workweek was over, and Double XP weekend has begun in City of Heroes, one of my favorite games.  To top it all off, I bought a new mobile phone, except it is more like a small always-online computer.  A small, SLOW computer, but even so.

But toward the end of the workday, I noticed that I was feeling weak. I came home and saw that my pulse was far above normal, so that just standing was the equivalent of exercise.  I tried to mow lawn again since it wasn’t raining today, but had to give it up, my pulse was way out of normal range then. I also had a slight headache and my skin felt warm to the touch.  The temperature was only elevated by less than a degree Celsius, though.

Over the course of the evening my hemorrhoids have grown ever more painful. These made themselves known earlier in the week as I had a near brush with constipation after adding salt to my diet.  There hasn’t been anything the last day or two to cause this pain though, which is worse than in many months at least.  Anyway, I haven’t heard of anyone getting fever from hemorrhoids (and I suspect 9 out of 10 women have had worse piles than I) so instead I was like OMG SWINE FLU PLZ HEAL in my head.

However, the pulse has gone down a bit, as have the other symptoms, except the hemorrhoids which are getting steadily worse. -_- I’ve read that a blood clot may happen in these occasionally and cause unbearable pain.  It is however not fatal (or about in the risk range of meteor strikes).  So the flu would be worse.  Last time I had (normal, seasonal) flu, the fever came in the night, and when I woke up it was just barely I did. I had to crawl, literally, to the bathroom, where I somehow with great effort got the cold water to run and splashed enough on me to cool me down to where I began to think clearly and take full control of my body. That was a near miss.  But at least I am not responsible for anyone else, so all I need to focus on is staying alive.  Tonight I am eating a small dose of paracetamol before going to bed.  I generally avoid Paracet because of the risk to the liver, and Aspirin because of the stomach lining, but right now my priority is a bit different. Dying with a great liver is not a priority. Not that I think the Great Flu would withdraw this easily, so I really don’t know what it is.  But just in case.

So yeah, still alive.  I still feel that I am lacking the bottom third of my lungs and just can’t get enough air, but it is hard to doubt now that it must be psychological. Today I vacuumed and mowed the lawn (with manual lawnmower, or “lawnmover” as I like to call it) for 45 minutes, and my pulse was exactly as I would expect on any other day. Only at the end of that time did it edge up more, probably because I had burnt up the easy sugar rather than any lack of oxygen.  I’d think that no matter whether it was a problem with lungs, blood circulation or brain stem, the body would try to speed up the heart rate to get oxygen around faster if there was less of it. So I must conclude that there isn’t less of it.

So if this is a software bug, where does it come from?  I was at work on Friday for 10 hour, which may have stressed me, what with my arm hurting like it hasn’t done in a couple years.  But all that was restored over the weekend, or as near as I could feel.  And the feeling does not magically arise when I go to work or disappear when I come home.  It is a very convincing emulation of respiratory problems, and I might never have doubted it if not for the amazing technology of the pulse watch.

Do I have a telepathic connection to someone who got the swine flu?  That’s pretty far-fetched and should probably be moved to the end of the list.

Then there was Saturday, when the landlord stopped by. He was not happy with the length of the grass on the lawn. I was – it is not like it’s growing wild, I just keep it at a pinky’s length rather than cropped down to the moss (yes there is moss and has, as far as I know, been since before I first saw the place).  So perhaps my subconscious is like “oh noes I can’t mow the lawn anymore because OMG I can’t breathe!” but that seems unlikely after I mowed for more than half an hour today (the lawns are many and large and the mower does not cut well anymore).

If it were childhood memories working their way to the surface, I assume they would emulate the bronchitic asthma I had at the time, not a medical condition I have never had.

The one thing that seems to negate it for a short time is breathing while yawning. No, seriously.  It is not an easy thing to do, but part of this experience is a near constant need to yawn.  Hmm, Google time. “Constant yawning” – yep, this is pretty common and usually a case of stress building up slowly to make certain muscles chronically tight.  It can also be a symptom of a number of very creepy things, but I think most of these would cause actually lower oxygen levels in the blood and thus a higher heart rate.

Curiously, one of the topmost replies mentioned that eating salt helped.  (Provided you don’t have high blood pressure, in which case salt is a risk factor.  My blood pressure has always been wonderful, but then again I generally don’t love salt.  When I grew up, my mom made salt-free bread for herself because of her hypertension, and I would eat it as happily as the normal bread she made for the rest of the family. I can’t say I noticed much difference. The next older brother up from me, however, was a dog for salt. He would lick it like some kind of candy, much like I would with sugar, only in more moderate doses.) The reason the salt reference caught my eye was that I noticed today after work that I was down 3 pounds or so from my average weight. Since I haven’t eaten less or worked out more, the sudden weight loss most likely means there is less water in my body than usual.  I haven’t been drinking less either, and it’s no hotter than usual.  But if I eat more salt, I am likely to retain the water in my body longer.  It seems most likely just placebo that it helped the other person – muscle tension is quite amenable to placebo – but since my blood pressure is awesome every time, it should be fairly harmless to try.  Mmm, yummy garlic salt! It is almost empty though.

More meditation is probably also in order.  Working less, however, is not really an option, since almost everyone else in my team is on summer vacation.  Let’s just hope the swine flu doesn’t get me now.  There was this guy sitting in front of me in the bus today coughing and sneezing. He looked rather boarish too, with a rotund body and head, small glaring eyes and a face full of bristle.  OK, that was probably not relevant.  I’m not exactly Robert Redford myself, to put it mildly, but I try to cover up any public coughing and sneezing at least.

Those who live will see! Of course, I better be one of those or you won’t see anything here.  So friendly prayers are always welcome. Prayers for me to do or not do particular things, however, are never welcome. That’s not really prayer but hostile magic, despite your convictions that you just want the best for me.  True prayer for another is always in the form of blessing or thanksgiving, both of which more energy to the higher self.  Anyway, hostile magic. Don’t do it.  My guardian angel has enough to do as is with my own antics, I suspect.  As for my atheist friends (yes, I probably still have a few) feel free to send me useful links or something. ^_^

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my lungs were too small.  I kept trying to breathe much more than I could.  I inhaled as much as I could, but it just did not seem to register. It was quite unpleasant.  And it continued through the workday. When I walked it was worse than when sitting, but not quite in proportion. So I suspected that it may not be the lungs actually.

When I came home, I measured my pulse while sitting, standing and doing light exercise on the magnetic bike.  My pulse was not particularly high and it varied normally with the workload. I would think it would have been much higher if I was actually lacking oxygen.

Now around midnight the feeling has changed to more bronchitis-like. I wonder if it really is all in my head. I don’t want to go to bed because I don’t feel sure I’ll wake up again. On the other hand, not sleeping is bad for your health. I guess the only way to find out is to let time do its thing.  If I write more entries after this one, it was presumably not fatal.

EDIT: It’s the next morning, and I’m still breathing. Not quite unexpected but still a cause for celebration, I think.