didn't I mention that?

One of my cousins was emailing me asking how things were. I thought "why isn't she reading my blog? Didn't I tell her about it?" Apparently - No, I didn't. She'd also never heard of them.
When I mentioned this to my mother she said "You never told me you had a blog." .....oops.

I have now passed on the address to my mother and am anticipating comments of a cringeworthy motherly type. Not because my mother is actually like that, but she has a warped sense of humour. Hi mum, Luv ya.

update on 'Lurgy

There's a general feeling I might have had whooping cough after all. Its going around and previously vaccinated people are getting it. As an adult, you don't always get the same symptoms as a child, the very long symptoms (still coughing all night and not doing a full days work) etc. etc though my coush does sound a lot like the one I have a link to.

The green stuff below is taken straight out of http://textbookofbacteriology.net/pertussis.html
The first stage, colonization, is an upper respiratory disease with fever, malaise and coughing, which increases in intensity over about a 10-day period. During this stage the organism can be recovered in large numbers from pharyngeal cultures, and the severity and duration of the disease can be reduced by antimicrobial treatment.

The second or toxemic stage of pertussis follows relatively nonspecific symptoms of the colonizaton stage. It begins gradually with prolonged and paroxysmal coughing that often ends in a characteristic inspiratory gasp (whoop). To hear the characteristic sound of whooping cough click whoop.wav (whoop.wav is copyright of Dr Doug Jenkinson, Nottingham, England. www.whoopingcough.net). During the second stage, B. pertussis can rarely be recovered, and antimicrobial agents have no effect on the progress of the disease.......................................Many young children are vaccinated against whooping cough with the pertussis vaccine. However, the vaccine is only approved for children under seven years of age. Antibody-mediated immunity wanes in approximately ten years, leaving older individuals more susceptible to the disease. Adults get infected, often to a lesser degree, but they are still able to spread the disease to unimmunized children.

Sounds very familiar. This means I may have spread it to Cairns, Kuranda, Mareeba, Innisfail (where I coughed in a very, very crowded Maccas at lunch time) and a few incidental places. I was hygienic with my coughing & did lots of hand washing, and my highly susceptible cousin hasn't come down with it, so maybe I haven't given it to anyone.

I knew I should have got someone to take a nasopharyngeal swab and streaked it out to check for Bordetella pertussis before I started antibiotics. Then I could have added the isolate to the clinical isolate collection in the -80C freezer.
I think the microbiologist in me is showing. We have a general attitude of; "wait, give me a sample/photo of the symptoms/biopsy of what the doctors take out so I can add it to the collection/use it for lectures/cut it up and look down a microscope at it"

Here endeth the microbiology lesson.

still sick but working

After two days off work and sleepless nights spent coughing, I went to the Doctor. She said "You aren't linked to the uni are you? There's whooping cough going around and if you haven't had a booster....." She gave me an antibiotic script just in case, though my cough wasn't whoopy and sent me home for another two days. Turns out the antibiotics were a good thing, as by the next morning I had an obvious and possibly secondary bacterial infection.

It took till Sunday night for the antibiotics to kick in and start cutting the symptoms back. I still haven't had more than three hours sleep a night, and I've wasted a week I could have been finishing my thesis, but I'm feeling better. I know this because I'm not hanging out checking the time, waiting till I can reload all the drugs into my system. BTW Ease-a-cold flue strength rocks!. Instead I'm thinking "hmm symptoms are getting worse again, oh yes, should have taken drugs 2 hours ago."

best bit about being sick for a week: getting to do some fiction reading that I hadn't had time for
most irritating bit: having no appetite for a week, eating very little and still not losing weight


Must get back to grading exams now. If I'm diligent I'll have them finished by tomorrow and can wallow in thesis editing for the rest of the week :)

sick as a dog

My father is a sharing man. He shared his cough with me. I have a chesty cough, a sore throat and a runny nose - and i'm sleepy without being able to sleep. I thought I was feeling better so i came into uni to hide in my office and do some work (so I wouldn't sicken others, I'm not a sharing person). I'm not feeling better. In fact, I've bundled up the exam papers i'm marking and copied my latest version of my thesis onto a dvd (its 128meg in size plus peripheral files) about a gig worth and I'm going home to pretend to work. Ironically, the question I'm up to marking is "name four airborn diseases and a risk factor for them - I'm willing to accept "common cold, Jenny's dad" as one answer right now. When I'm feeling better I will tell you all about my trip to Cairns.

I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted ...

So close I can smell the rejection letters from the examiners

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My thesis, without an introduction, abstract and lists of tables, table of contents etc is now 223 pages long, made up of 63474 words. Just thought i'd let you know.