Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m moving out of my California shop. I hung on to it, first because I was sharing it with Tom, who still lives there, and later because I was in Oakland for most of the spring and thought I might be coming back for school in the fall, and still later, because I was too sick to leave my room in NC and couldn’t deal with travel there.

It’s been a few days of forklifting things off the racks and palletizing them for transport (at some point). It’s a welding shop so everything is covered in years’ worth of fossilized grinding dust. For the last 2 days I just locked myself in and slept on the couch- I’m excruciatingly sick and have few functional hours in the day, so the loading is taking forever.

The clean ‘residents’ bathroom (as opposed to the minimalist day users’ bathroom) at the shop, which I helped build, is the only one with a shower, and it’s locked and inaccessible to non-resident users. Last night I was filthier than you can imagine, coated in carcinogenic who knows what, and in pain, and cold, and miserable, and I tried to break in to the locked shower room to no avail. I shivered myself to sleep on the couch.

Babesiosis is a malaria-like illness (though it seems to reside mostly in bone marrow rather than red blood cells themselves as far as I know???). One of it’s hallmark traits is chills and fevers, just like malaria. I haven’t had night sweats/fevers in quite a few weeks, since I’ve been treating it with anti-malarial drugs, butbefore that, there was a pretty regular 4:30 am microbial party in my bone marrow, or whatever it is that the evil bastidges do to cause drenching fevers.

This week of course I was beating myself up way beyond my capacity, and some of my other symptoms that I hadn’t seen in months have been coming back. So, at the ‘regularly scheduled’ fever hour of 5 am, I got a drenching malaria-like sweat episode, soaking my clothes and blankets all the way through- all while still covered in my thick layer of black, nasty grinding dust. This disease misery stuff is starting to push me over the edge.