Home-sick :(

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Today, for the first time in Italy, I got home-sick.

Ha! ok I got you! I'm not really actually homesick... but I am "home sick" if you know what I mean. That's right, today, at the beginning of my last week here in Italy, I got some sort of bug that left me feeling like crap the whole day.

Now in a way, it's kind of a good thing... because I get to experience the way that ill kids are treated by their parents in Europe. Some of the things that Elena was doing (or trying to get me to do) were pretty unusual... like she was soaking my forehead, wrists, and neck with some solution that was a mix of water and what looked like Bio-shield (the stuff we preserved our dissection cats with in anatomy... when I first saw it, I thought, "what the hell is that?")

Anyways, I'm trying to think positively about it, because we know the course of the illness (the virus we believe it is has hit more than just me in the last day. Stupid virus... is it even a live creature??? These are the questions I am bound to ponder as I lay sick in bed.)

As you can see, I'm trying to keep a sense of humor... because laughter is the very best medicine (except during and after appendicitis and an appendectomy.... I learned that the hard way)

So to tell you the truth, even though I've said a lot, I have more to say about the day... but I really want to get some sleep. So, for today, this is all I'm going to publish in today's entry. Tomorrow, when either (a) I have time since I'll be doing things after I feel better or (b) I'm still sick in bed, I will try to add more to today's blog entry. I'm sorry to leave you with such a short entry, but you should understand 😊.

Goodnight everyone! (Buonanotte!) and hopefully your Italian blogger will be better when the morning comes!
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Ok so I'm up and I feel a lot better. I've decided to finish out yesterday's blog and then make a separate one for today. It will also be short since it seems like I won't be doing much... but I'm still trying to have a blog for each day I'm here.

So here's how yesterday all went down... I was actually afraid I was going to get sick when I was lying down to bed at 3:00 in the morning when I wrote the blog from the dinner at Antonella's house... I felt kind of achy all over. But I woke up and I was fine... I wasn't sick or anything. Federico was over so Paolo, him, and I just did random things for the morning and the beginning of the afternoon. We played Wii... hung out in Paolo's room... ate some ice-cream (They also spent a lot of time messing around with the Jell-O I made... jiggling it around for a while and stabbing it with forks and spoons. It was very entertaining seeing how much they enjoyed eating and playing with the Jell-O. Even Paolo liked it. Ha! And he wouldn't try the Jell-O the first time...)

It was during lunch when I first got that feeling of illness... after two bites of my meal, just suddenly I lost my appetite... It was a split second change and it was really really weird... I don't know what made that happen because I didn't have any sickness in my stomach or head....

However, soon after that I ended up laying down in my room with a pretty nasty headache... I decided to try to take my mind off of it (taking my mind off of my mind... that's an interesting thought) by watching some Whose Line clips or something.

Then Paolo came in and told me we were leaving. "Great" i thought, so I took some DayQuil and started to get ready, and then went downstairs where he was getting out his motorcycle and Tommy was here with his 4-wheeler for me to ride on the back of. Well, I really couldn't say I didn't want to go because Tommy rode all the way over to the house just to take ME, and I didn't want him to have wasted any effort. Plus, I was optimistic that the DayQuil would take care of my headache and that the fresh air would help out as well.

We ended up stopping by a gas station, so that really didn't help out my headache much, and once we got to the post office where we met up with other people, I just went and laid down on a bench for a while, and then decided to walk around the area to try to feel better. Nothing was really helping.. and I was just hoping that Elena would get off work soon so I could tell Paolo to ask her to pick me up and take me home... Just when I was thinking about that, (and right after I found my first coin on my trip here to Europe- a one-cent Euro, worth about 1.4 pennies in the US. Score!), I looked over to Paolo and there he was, talking to Elena. So I went to her and told her that I wasn't feeling well, and she drove me home. Thank god!

As soon as we got home, we walked in and found Claudia sleeping on the couch. Elena woke her up to see how she was and it turns out that she wasn't feeling well too. We both had high temperatures. (How Elena took our temperatures was different that what we do in the USA. Instead of the contraption you stick in the ear or the thermometer that you place under the tongue, this was a thermometer that you placed under your armpit for 3 or 4 minutes. That was odd. Also, the thermometer was all in Celsius, so when she read the results to me, it didn't mean anything until I converted it into Fahreinheit--my temp being about 100 degrees. Great.) So we both had fevers, but we made the best out of it by blaming it on each other. The weird thing was we couldn't figure out anything that only Claudia and I had in common... She wasn't at Antonella's so it couldn't have been from there, Paolo and Federico had the same lunch so it couldn't have been that... Claudia and I had different breakfasts so not that... Our illness had an unknown root cause.

So I laid in bed and watched a Star-Wars episode of Family Guy. Elena came and told me that Andrea Barracca (one of Paolo's friends in the Mad Jokers band) also had the same illness as well as one of Paolo and Claudia's little cousins. So this thing was everywhere it seemed. I eventually decided to sleep a while. When I woke up, it was around 11 P.M, and everyone was getting ready to go to bed. I came to the kitchen and took some medicine that Elena gave me (she also told me that she too was starting to feel ill... and even today she stayed home from work.) I suddenly felt like I needed to be near a trash-can or a toilet if you know what I mean (probably because I got a whiff of Nico, who had recently been smoking a cigar...). But as I sat on the bidet, I felt like my fever broke because I got pretty sweaty and felt better. So I went back and sat in the kitchen, where Elena prepared a drink that was supposed to evoke vomiting (I refused to drink this, because I didn't want to do that unless I really had to, and usually if I had to, my body would do it itself, thank you very much!)

So instead, Elena took the Bio-Shield looking stuff (that I talked about in the original portion of the blog) and added it to water (I found out today when I had a chance to read the label that it was just denatured alcohol). Then she would take a rag and dip it in the solution and hold it on my forehead, neck, and wrists for a while. She continued to do this when I layed in bed for a while (I felt bad because she also felt sick and she should be getting sleep as well 😞) but it was very surprising how much it made me feel better (I think the smell of the denatured alcohol made my headache go away, and the coldness of the water made my fever go down).

After she left, I had to be stealth-like to get out my computer and type the first part of my blog for you all, so you knew what was going down. I didn't want to leave you all hanging without a daily blog entry. But now this is a fuller story about what happened yesterday. So not only do you have today's entry to read later this afternoon, but by the time you wake up, you will also have the second part of yesterday's to read. Hopefully you enjoy it! As I said, I do feel a lot better!

So, to change it up for once, this entry will end with
"Buon Giornata!" (Have a nice day!)

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Photos

Oh... Dr. House...
Right now, the guy sick in bed is me in this photo. My goal in life is to someday be the other guy in the picture... except a little less of a jerk.

The Post Office
The one picture I took yesterday... This entry, and probaby the one from the 22nd, are probably going to be really picture-lame. Sorry!

Walking to Rovigo, 6-20
Another picture from walking to Rovigo from Antonella's house

Canal picture (#2) 6-20
I've actually been wanting to take this picture for a long time.. and when walking into Rovigo, I finally had the chance. I thought it was a cool view

Canal picture, 6-20
One of the pictures I took on the walk to Rovigo from Antonella's house (I'm trying to put some pictures for you to look at in this entry!)

Comments

[Katie Turner]

Sorry you're sick
Sorry you're puny. I'm enjoying reading about your trip. When you get home with Paolo we would like you to come to Rotary one Thursday eve I have July 14th and 21st open Let me know which will work for you Katie