love sick

Hello.

The voice at the end of the line was coarse, a lil soft like tired.

She's coming down with a flu. Yesterday she was feeling a slight chill and didn't have the appetite for lunch. This early afternoon she gave me a call and said she wanted to abandon the rest of the day in the clinic and head home.

Could I pick her up?

No. Blame it on coding. But that problem had an immediate resolution. I sent a sms to the driver, Mang Leo, to pick her up.

Normally, I would meet her halfway after work. Our meeting place would be the Petron fuel station in Macapagal Avenue. We would sometimes grab a quick snack there before heading home.

From her clinic, she will find her way to the MRT Boni Station that will send her to the end of the line, EDSA. She will get off and ride the bus that goes to SM Mall of Asia.

But we didn't do anything of that today. I went home by myself, without stopping at the familiar Petron. I called her up and asked her what she wanted me to bring for her. She replied, vanilla coke and a bag of clover chips.

She whimpers when she's really sick. So when I arrived and woke her up, she hugged me and cried.

Masakit ang ulo ko.

I'm good giving alcohol baths and sleeping lightly to make sure that my patient takes meds on time.

Needless to say, I feel like a zombie as I write this post because I lack complete sleep. But that's alright.

These will be one of those days when the doctor becomes a patient.

* * *

kids should know that...

The most famous and lethal outbreak was the so-called Spanish flu pandemic, which lasted from 1918 to 1919. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people while current estimates say 50 million to 100 million people worldwide were killed. This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed as many people as the Black Death. This huge death toll was caused by an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms. Indeed, symptoms in 1918 were so unusual that initially influenza was misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera, or typhoid. (wikipedia)