Heated Note:
Ordeal
10 October 2019
¶ When I felt the heat rising wafting from the HVAC this morning, I burst into a number of Latin ejaculations. Finally: ambient warmth. Which is quite different from diving under blankets in a cold room.
When I was in bed, I felt like a rug merchant, hiding out under my stock. When I was not in bed, I felt that I was crawling on all fours through the Arctic wilderness — except that I was crawling on my neck and shoulders, which were screamingly sore.
I’ve got a something. A cold with a mild fever? Who knows. I’m not a Simpsons fan, but I believe the word for my medical condition is, basically, fallapart. Having just visited all the doctors, I don’t think it’s anything serious. Kathleen says that I’m worn out, and I wonder if that can be nearly as true as I feel it is. Why would I be worn out, though?
It does seem, if I may answer from the side, that I have not yet returned to the state of health from which last year’s foot infection abducted me. Losing dozens of pounds (ninety, actually, at one extreme point) has not turned out to be the boon that I should have expected. Of course I look better. But I don’t feel better, not at all. The doctors sheepishly agree (with me — not entirely reassuring, given the medical credentials that I acquired in law school) that I may have lost all that weight too quickly, and that too much of it may have been upper-body muscle. One of the doctors felt that I was feeling the cold more acutely than ever before because my figure was no longer so amply upholstered.
I was certainly feeling the cold. Kathleen has always claimed to be miserable in cold weather. Only now, though, do I understand. It’s like the life of a student in a frigid Petersburg flat, with hardly anything to eat.
Because of my flu or whatever it is, I wasn’t eating much myself.
When, about ten days ago, the temperature in our apartment drifted into the low sixties, I began to long for the heat to be turned on, checking it out four or five times a day. Then the management posted a notice: “transitioning” to heat would begin on Tuesday. Begin? Never having depended much on the heat, I had never noticed that it takes about three days to complete this process. Sure enough, on the morning of the third day…
Deo gratias!