The title of this post no doubt makes you curious just what statistic I'm talking about.

Let me fill you in:

Around the world, nearly 90,000 people have been diagnosed with H1N1, also known as the Swine Flu.

I now count myself in that number.

Thankfully, I am now on the recovering end of this bug.

Dreadfully, I could have used a few doses of that TamilFlu stuff to knock it out of me, but no doctor I saw would prescribe it.

Assholes.

Okay, let me fill you in about H1N1 and it's symptoms:

- sudden onset of fever and coughing: check.
- high fever lasting a minimum of 3 days: check (yeah, I love 102 fever for that long).
- aches, mostly in joints: check (all I can say is: OMG OW!!!).
- chest and nasal congestion: check (feels like an elephant on your chest and a cotton field stuffed up your nose).
- post-nasal drip: check (try sleeping with tissue up your nose to stop it - fun).
- headaches: check (my queendom for a good painkiller).
- dizzyness: check (still have it).
- ehrem... stomach issues: check (I should have just set up a cot in the bathroom).
- exhaustion: check (feels like you can't get enough sleep).
- productive cough: check (I love hacking up a lung, really I do)
- difficulty breathing: check (this is in extreme cases, but I already have breathing problems as it is so you can imagine what Hell I was going through).

As you can see, I was not having a good time. This all started in the evening of November 3rd and I am just now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

No, not that light. I'm not dying yet.

So week 4, 5, and 6 will not be written for Ombrenoire for the recap as there was no week 4, 5, and 6. Kind of hard to play when you can't even focus on a blank wall without the room spinning without you.

I had suspected at the beginning of all this that it was the dreaded H1N1 flu, but I couldn't get myself out of bed to see my doctor... and I was not going to spend 12 hours minimum in a crowded Emergency Room to a: spread it or b: catch something to make me worse. A call to my doctor confirmed my symptoms were H1N1. And finally a visit to a walk-in clinic (my doctor decided to take his vacations at the worst times) confirmed it for good... or bad... whatever.

That last doctor gave me some of the most curious advice. The entire time I was home I was taking NyQuil to sleep at night and Buckley's in pill form to function and suppress the coughing. The doctor told me to stop all that and just concentrate on pain management.

Yeah, easy for him to say. He's not the one hacking up a lung.

So here I sit, waiting for the coughing to subside enough for me to go to bed comfortably, staring at that bottle of NyQuil in longing, tasting blood with each cough. Thankfully, I still have a salbutamol pump left from when I had bronchitis last year. It's a broncho-dilator, meaning it opens the airways to let me breath. It lessens the coughing, but not by much.

I head back to work on Monday with a bottle of Gravol in my pocket to help with the dizzyness and a packet of Halls lozenges to help with the cough.

I hate my life.