Eating Poison

The last few days have been very uncomfortable for me--the side effects of the rabies vaccine are not fun. It's made harder, I think, by the fact that I'm generally pretty healthy and I don't generally have bad reactions to drugs. The last bad one was to the narcotic pain reliever the dental surgeon gave me after my wisdom teeth removal: it worked great the first day, and on the second day it started making me throw up every twenty minutes. It made for a very unpleasant four hours, but then it was out of my bloodstream and I stopped taking it. But stopping the rabies vaccine isn't an option.

Yesterday was a low point; I didn't have the tingling and weird vision effects that had made Sunday so interesting but the pain in my head was the worst yet. And I was tired: tired of the pain, tired of the fear. I was stressing hard over it, so much that I went into a friend's office, closed the door, and asked for a hug. I normally live in a don't-touch-me bubble of space, and my friend knows it. She gave me a big long hug and told me that I was being wonderfully brave and she admired how pro-active I was being in managing the issue. I feel neither brave nor pro-active: rabies is fatal, and that's that.

I am feeling better this morning, but I have a tetnus shot today and another rabies shot tomorrow so I'm not expecting it to last. On the other hand, yesterday I still managed to bake two batches of gorgeous-looking rice bread, so apparently I don't need a fully-functioning central nervous system in order to bake. Good to know, I think.