The interview in Baltimore came toward the end of my visit and, all too soon, it was time for me to go back to Santa Fe. The night before I was due to leave, I helped make a dinner of an oven-baked "fried" chicken recipe I'd made and loved in Santa Fe, accompanied by some mashed potatoes. The chicken didn't turn out as good, and the mashed potatoes were gluey--not my best meal ever. Especially not when we all got sick the next day. Lovely older sister insisted it wasn't the dinner, as the chicken had cooked far too long (while we waited for brother in law to come home) to have been undercooked. I maintained I must have somehow contaminated the mashed potatoes. However it happened, we were all feeling ooky--myself moreso than I had been. Enough to not want coffee--big mistake.
Brother in law drove me to Union Station to catch a train up to BWI, as planned. On the train, I started to feel it--the onset of headache. I attributed it to my lack of caffeine, but still didn't feel I could stomach coffee or the like. Got on the plane to go home feeling the continued flu symptoms, now expounded (as the flight went on) by a severe caffeine headache and the general nastiness of air travel. All I wanted was to sleep, but had managed to sit in the one seat on our full flight that didn't recline, and spent the entire flight miserable contorted in various ways, trying to find a way to nap.
When we finally arrived in New Mexico, I was picked up at the airport by my mom, who drove me back to her house to retrieve my car. I was due at work the next day, and felt I couldn't call in. We had 3 cake decorators--one part time, and one who had pulled 13 continuous days of work to allow my vacation (as that was, according to our manager, the only way to make it happen). Even if I'd wanted to call in, I had no idea who to call or what to do if the other decorator refused. I figured I would tough it out, miserable as I felt.
My mom was urging me to go to the urgent care clinic--she didn't say so at the time, but she apparently thought rather strongly that I had flu that had progressed to the borderline edge of pneumonia. Working in a hospital, it was something she saw happen, and apparently something that could quickly become bad.
I, again working that extreme denial, refused. I just wanted to get back to my apartment, sleep in my bed, and tough it out. She did impress upon me a Z-pack (a course of antibiotics designed to hit hard and fast), and thank god for that. In hindsight, she was probably right (as most moms usually are) and goodness know what would have happened had a pushed myself to keep going to work without any sort of treatment. As it was, I had just started to feel like myself again 2 and a half weeks later when I got the call from Baltimore, offering me a job.
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