I get what you mean, but I feel no nostaligia for headaches, sore throats, high fevers and feeling dizzy.

Oh yeah, have I a story about that…

A few years ago, I was at my previous work as an IT guy for a financial services company.

I remember sitting in the taxi on my way to the airport to fly over to London and do some work there in our remote office.

As I sat in the taxi, I realized that I was feeling the start of a cold comming, and cursed silently, I am going abroad and am getting sick right at the start? Sigh…

When I travel normally, I am quite energetic and will checkout the airport take photos and all the rest, I LIKE airports, but I just had zero energy.

I remember the flight being overbooked and the staff called out to see if anyone would be ok with flying down to Vienna and then back up to London, I did consider it since it would have been interesting to see a new airport, this was on a sunday and I had the time. But I didn’t have the energy, so I passed and eventually another guy took the deal.

Anyway, I get to London, and it is sweaty, I am quite uncomfortable and tired, normally I would dump my bags in my room, and go for a walk to get my baerings.

A perk of working in the finance sector, I got to stay at a very high end hotel, and I remember the lobby being full of beautiful Indian women and plenty of stylish Indian men, I believe there was an Indian wedding hosted at the hotel…

Anyway, the week just gets worse, I have less and less energy, it is getting harder to swallow, I have lost most of my metal focus.

On thursday, it got so bad that I could not even swallow tomato soup, I could hardly speak and had not really slept at all.

I chatted with my coworker over teams about how I missed Ekströms Blåbärssoppa, a classic blueberry soup that is amazing when you are sick, and he found a shop next to my hotel that carried it and convinced me to go back to my hotel.

I found the shop and bought two liters of the soup and got back to the hotel.

Inside my room I opened one of the packages of blueberry soup and started drinking, and damn it just worked!

The soup is so smooth and mild that I could drink it, it contains a lot of vitamin C and sugar, so your body gets the vitamins and energy it needs to fight the infection, I then went to bed and slept for several hours.

Then came the next issue my nose started filling up with snot and mucus and the only good way to get rid of it was to stand in the shower and let the water vapours do their thing, I had done so a few times when the room phone rang.

The hotel room phone rang!

I had never experienced that before, I picked up expecting a wrong number but instead the reception desk had called about a water leak and sent up a technician.

This technician showed me water outside my room in the corridoor, and then mostly blamed me for “splashing”.

I was 30+ years old at the time, I knew how to take a shower, but I didn’t have the energy to argue with the tech…

Anyway, I promissed to be more careful and he left.

And I was worried about if I would loose my job since I had used my company card when checking in they had it on file and I was worried that they would charge me for the water dammage…

I spoke with my dad who calmed me down, and got back to sleep.

Then woke up a few hours later needing to clear my nose again, ok, so I did what I did before and stepped into the shower for a bit taking great care to not splash at any point.

Well, shortly there after the phone rang again, it was the reception desk, they sent up another technician to look at the issue.

And this guy actually opened a panel in the bath tub wall and immediately found the issue;

A leaking seal between the tub and the wall.

I have never felt such relief, I wasn’t responsible for the water dammage.

My room got upgraded and I got a decent nights sleep.

Flying home from London was a chore, I could not do anything expect look out the window while coughing up phlegm in the air sickness bag and drink water.

I am soo thankfull that I didn’t have a person in the seat next to me.

I come home and take a week off work, I went to the doctor to get a sample taken as to why I could not stop coughing, and this I feel terrible about, the nurse taking the smaple from my throat didn’t wear any PPE, and I could not stop my self and coughed her right in the face, she didn’t even have glasses, she ran and washed he face whole I appologized, I got some proper cough syrup perscribed which fibally had some effect.

The next week when feeling slightly better, debrief my manager, then later that week I started getting back pain, so I went and had it checked out, got an x-ray, and yeah, pneumonia…

I was sent for more test, and when another throat sample was being taken I warned the nurse that she should use PPE as I had accidentally coughed the last nurse doing this in her face, she did so but I managed to not cough this time.

I was sent home with standard antibiotics and other medicine and was put on sick leave.

But it just kept getting worse, I could not swallow the antibiotic pills so I dissolved them in water and drank them, only they had a very strong taste causing me to gag meaning I could only sip it and juice alternating to keep it down, drinking one pill could take hours.

So obviously this didn’t work, so after some back and forth I went to hospital, and after a few hours was admitted.

I stayed two nights.

I had an IV with drip and another one with antibiotics, and finally started getting way better.

When discharged I got a perscription for stronger antibiotics that came in smaller pills, I still had trouble swallowing them though, but they dissolved way quicker in water and didn’t taste anywhere half as bad as the original medicine, so I could use less water as just drink it in one gulp.

Around this time my mom got sick with very similar symptoms as I had, unfortunately I never got my diagnosis (I even checked my online patient journal just now and I could not find anywhere it would say what I had)

Well later it turned out that my mom had caught mycoplasma, which is the running hypothosies for me as well.

I was out of the office for one and half months.

Then shortly after I got back to work, had paid my bills (about €50) I got a letter from the hospital.

Aparantly I may have been exposed to MRSA and needed to be tested for it.

So I sent a message to work telling them that I would be late next morning and went to the local clinic, did the samples and went into work.

I was later confirmed to not have MRSA!