Each day seems to bring with it a new phase of illness.
After being plied with various gels, ointments and powders yesterday evening, the itching was more or less under control when I went to bed at midnight. I had started to feel tired only an hour or so earlier, which struck me as strange after just an hour of sleep the previous night.
Sarah gave me a homeopathic pill (Rhus toxicodendron) as I went to bed. The next thing I knew, it was 05:50 and I was waking up to pee. I couldn’t believe I’d slept without interruption for almost six hours, which immediately forced the realisation that I was no longer itching at all.
I peed and went back to bed, sleeping for another couple of hours.
When I finally got up, full of optimism, things took a turn for the worse. I felt drained of energy and a headache was quickly coming on.
Within a hour, the headache had become a real brain-burster. My head felt like a watermelon that had been thrown off a cliff onto a lava field. The same headache has had me incapacitated for most of the day. I’m enjoying a period of respite as I write this.
The spread of welts seems to have slowed to a crawl, perhaps even stopped. Maybe that’s because there’s nowhere left for them to go. I have a couple on my fingertips and elsewhere on my hands. They’ve also made it down to my ankles and even between my toes. I didn’t know chicken pox ever went down to the extremities like this.
The welts on my fingertips are very small and aren’t quite breaching the skin’s surface. They feel like splinters or very minor burns.
Buckets of sweat have been coming out of me today. The diarrhoea was also back this morning. The symptoms at this stage are thus very similar to the first couple of days, when I still thought I was coming down with stomach flu. Maybe the virus is withdrawing with the same force with which it took hold.
I’m cautiously going to say that I’m probably over the worst of this now, but who knows? Some of the blisters are looking opaque now. Yesterday, they were transparent. Hopefully, they’ll all start to scab over soon. The ones that had burst or been scratched open are already starting to crust over.
I still look like the arse-end of a mangy dog and that’s not going to improve overnight. I just hope I can emerge at the end of this without too many scars.