Surely it's not supposed to be that difficult?

Dear all,

I did feel badly enough last Sunday evening to take some meds, and ended up skipping work Monday because by the time I woke up it's around 10:30 already (and then take into account the hour long bus ride and that I definitely was not up to staying late to make up for the hour that I missed, I emailed in sick and then, much to my surprise, dropped off to sleep again. I think I slept for the majority of the day somehow without penalty, because I slept fairly soundly that night too. By the time I staggered in on Tuesday I was much recovered and found a note from my labmate instructing me not to come in until I'm "no longer contagious". This prompted me to wonder, at which point in catching a cold / flu virus, exactly are we no longer contagious?



Cue my email to Victoria, friend and Doctor-in-Training, because sadly, though I had to present a paper on influenza before, knowing the molecular mechanisms for viral infection within a human cell tells me squat about which point in the actual disease they correlate to, nor does it tell me at which point in the curve of viral reproduction in a person are they the most contagious.  She emailed back and I'm going to share the wisdom (unless she's against this then I'll take it down later):

For the influenza virus I've heard stuff like...you're contagious for a few days before you show symptoms, and then possibly even for a week or more after the symptoms show up.  I'm pretty sure it varies with different strains, and also varies heavily between individual patients - the main thing that determines whether you're contagious is your viral load (higher chance more of them get in bodily fluids), but people's immune systems will respond differently to the infection anyway so they'll start showing/stop having symptoms at different times.  An example of this is older people - sometimes they don't even get fevers because their immune response/other stuff isn't strong enough, so they have a very atypical presentation and you might not even realize their illness is caused by an infection until things get bad.

In conclusion:  life is complicated.

Though my health insurance coverage is such that I can go in to the student health center next week and get my free flu vaccine, so hopefully that means I won't have to worry about the viral load from anyone (well, mostly people on the bus) after that. (Though this is of course not guaranteed: Wendy and I both got flu shots last year, but thanks to Kenshin, her son, and the exposure at day care, she repeatedly got sick anyway.)

Though speaking of Victoria (and the fact that I'm collecting reference material for that project of mine), she got and mailed me a copy of Sandman: Brief Lives! (Thank you Victoria!) Annie's recommended this to me ages ago and even mentioned willingness to lend me her copy. You can imagine that this is somewhat difficult given where we each are -- the only way we can be located further apart and still be in the same country is if I move either a) north, possibly to Alaska or b) to Hawaii. But cheers -- I woke up early  this morning and realized that I haven't done the thing where I woke up and then just stayed in bed to read / draw since I moved to Davis (it's hard for me to go back to sleep in the morning both because I know oversleeping in the morning makes me groggy and cranky and also because these days there're only so many times my brain can run through the to-do list before I find myself wide awake in a fit of neurosis-induced awareness) (seriously, it works better than caffeine: this morning I manage to hold out for four minutes before I am thoroughly awake, and I woke up at 7:11am without an alarm clock).

But I digress: the point is that I decided to relive my youth (irony intended) this morning by staying in bed and reading Sandman, so now I can sort of review it.

First of all, it's written by Neil Gaiman. That alone should provide some information to the style of storytelling. Okay. It provides a LOT of information regarding the style. It's...most similar to American Gods, of all the story that I've read from him, though it's a lot broader culturally than just "American" (I'm still debating what this label means, exactly, and it doesn't help that it can mean so many different things). (I will admit that the page in there where it referenced the traffic line between Davis and Sacramento filled me with glee.) "Brief lives" is pretty much the reoccurring theme, and though over three years in a biomed lab has done a lot to obliterate my squeamishness, Sandman is...definitely not for the kids. In fact I would warn Lucy away from it because of the eye-thing (ugh that page). Think American Gods. Think that every gruesome scene in American Gods now come pictorially depicted!

Yeah. 

But the story is awesome! The art isn't really to my taste but the story made up for it, and even though the art style wasn't to my taste, there are a lot of designs in there that I think are really cool. Mostly the imaginary realms. Though I should note "cool" does not necessarily equal "pretty".

So that was my bit of rambling fangirl-ness. After reading that and showering and getting all set for the day I went off to lab, then on a quest to hunt down a pair of jeans that fit. Somehow this proved to be extremely difficult and ended up taking two hours because a) I didn't know where they kept the petite size racks, b) there is a dearth of female jeans not of the skinny-cut and/or low-ride variety c) the sizes don't match between the different brands and d) the first three pairs that I found that fit were all marked the the wrong price. My conclusion from this particular excursion is that cloth shopping is no less horrible since when I last tried it. I am compiling a list of which size from what brand that I have worn / tried on and how well they fit, so in the future I can just go directly to those and avoid cut down the confusion of size between brands and trips to the fitting room. (Seriously, should it be this difficult?) (And why does my mother always buy me pants that are two to three sizes up from what fit? Belts and I don't agree. Mostly because I have even more issues finding the right belt -- the kind to keep pants up, not the kind that are merely decorative-- than I do pants).

Someday I will do all my cloth shopping entirely online. I am already sort of  half way there.

And after that, I was tired. I went and picked up the photos printed last week (LOADS of photos -- they put them into two separate bags and put a rubber band around them, even) and got the car oil changed (figured I should do that before Thanksgiving) and then decided I'm too tired to deal with groceries today, so it will have to wait until tomorrow, so I ended up blogging and sorting through photos instead. I wonder if anyone else besides me still bothers printing out photos?