The strangest thing happened last night. I’m a cold weather kind of guy. I sweat in a snowstorm. But last night, I woke up at three in the morning, shivering uncontrollably, and feeling colder than I ever have, except possibly for when I went to the hospital with the Norwalk Flu. I didn’t feel sick, I was just unbelievably cold.
We have this big green blanket on our bed. In my head, I call it “the blanket of UGH!” because it always makes me too hot. Even on really cold nights, I usually end up peeling it half off my side of the bed, because I’m sweating. Last night I pulled the UGH completely over me, but it did almost nothing to make me feel warmer. I turned on the electric heater in our room, and set it to 80 degrees. Within ten minutes, it had achieved the desired temperature in the room, and I was still shivering.
In desperation, I went to the closet and got a terry bathrobe, and pulled it over me. I was STILL freezing. At that point, my shaking woke Sabrina up, and she took care of me. She checked my temperature (99, not enough to be a real fever) and went and found a big, fluffy quilt, which she folded in half, and covered me with.
At this point, I was in an 80 degree room, covered with a sheet, two blankets, and two layers of really fat quilt, and I was still shivering a bit. I did breath exercises to distract myself, and finally went back to sleep.
At six o’clock, I woke from a nightmare. In my nightmare, I was in the Sahara, trying to find shelter from the heat. I was riding a Camel, but just as I saw an oasis in the distance, my camel melted on the sand. I felt myself starting to melt, when I saw another camel, ran, and jumped on its back to get away from the horrific heat of the sand. He carried me toward the oasis a bit, while I swooned from the heat, before he too melted. Fortunately, I was apparently in a part of the Sahara littered with friendly camels, and I immediately found yet another onto whose back I could jump. Then HE melted. And so on, and so on, until after one melting camel, I happened to look down as I felt the sand begin to melt me, and saw that in fact it was the sand that was melting where it came in contact with me, not my feet. I knew now that I was what had melted my poor camel friends. I started to run for the oasis, searching for some relief from the heat, when I woke up to find myself sweating profusely under a heavy pile of bedclothes.
Sabrina took my temperature again, and found it at 100.2, but it immediately dropped into the normal range once I kicked off the blankets etc.
I have no idea what happened to me. I seem to have survived with no ill effects, other than a headache, and I don’t appear to be sick in any way. My temperature is down to 98.2 (I run about 98 on average, rather than the 98.6 they yammered about so much in health class), so I’m definitely not fighting any bugs, and everything seems to be in working order.
