Feeling Hot Hot Hot

I felt the chills.  I started shivering.

Soon after, my body began tensing up as an involuntary response.  

The initial reading was 99.1, and two hours later the thermometer registered 101.1.

Yet again in my life, one minute I was a healthy guy going about my business, but with a fever the next minute.

My mother has often recounted an incident from when I was about four years old.  I had a raging fever and was delirious.  What worried her was not the fever itself, nor the delirium, but what I kept saying over and over in that delirious stage.  I didn't call out amma or appa.  I didn't blabber about the sweets that I liked.  Nope.  Not at all.  Instead, as my mother recalls, I called out the gods names over and over.

My mother was worried that I was on my way out.  She kept applying cold towels on my entire body, while she also called out to the same gods.

I survived to hear her tell this story many times over.

A sudden and raging fever has always been a part of my childhood.  Well, even into the middle-age!

Once, during one of those fevers, I complained about intense aches in my legs.  I could immediately see that my parents were, as we would say now, freaked out.  The memory was fresh.

I was about seven or eight years old when we went to grandma's village to attend my father's cousin's wedding.  The bride's youngest brother came down with a strange fever that quickly weakened his legs.  He couldn't walk.  For a couple of years after that, he wore braces on both legs and slowly dragged one foot after another.

So, when I complained about legs that ached while running a high fever, my parents had reasons to be freaked out.

Another fever out of nowhere that could have altered the trajectory of my life happened during the board exams.  In the education system in the old country, the school leaving exams determined one's academic fate, which then had the potential to mess up life altogether.

My father rushed me to the doctor, who recommended a simple treatment protocol: Rest, and do not do any exam preparation. 

As one who never cared to spend time prepping for exams, I found the doctor's recommendation to be utterly useless!

The fever weakened me a great deal though.  For one of the exams, my father escorted me to the hall and sat outside ready, in case he had to rush me to the hospital.

The latest fever episode is but one in a long running series.  I suppose I have always been hot! ;)