nuchal rigity

You know those days when you get on a plane to go to California from New York, watch 6 1/2 hours of Animal Planet straight, openly sob into your Taro Blue Potato Chips when the Pedigree commercials come on that get you right in the fucking solar plexus (and don't even SAY THE WORDS "that ASPCA commercial" because I friggen lose it just thinking about it so just stop it right now) and every rerun of Animal Precinct makes you realize that ALL YOU WANT TO DO is pack heat and save dogs and then you spend just enough hours in California to get fat on huevos rancheros and margaritas, come to terms with the fact that you miss the ocean like it was a kidney, get back on a plane from California to New York, watch five more hours of Animals (in peril) Planet, get out of the plane, it's -17 degrees, the cab line is fifty million people deep and you didn't bring a hat and by the time you make it home all the take out restaurants are closed and you don't even have cheesy mac in a box and you have to get up the next morning at 6am to get on another plane to New Hampshire to look at the house you bought and hopefully still really really really like many hundreds of thousands of dollars really love, almost get kicked out of school for shirking off on your clinical training and escaping only by the grace of god or someone who just works for him, getting back on another plane back to New York, spike a 102 temperature, start hallucinating, begin your first day of surgery a day late at 5:00am with a core body temperature of 101.7 F (despite 5,000,000 mg of Dayquil) and active rigors, make nice with the residents, literally FLEE during afternoon rounds by running down the back stairs because the whole light/end of tunnel/angel of death thing is going on in front of you and for once its not your patients and so you crawl home on all fours through the snow to get into the bath and there's no hot water and by the time your husband comes home you are speaking in tongues and have swallowed half the bottle of Nyquil and thank god he's there because lord knows the cats can't pick you up out of the bath tub because they have no thumbs and then you proceed to sleep sweat profusely for 11 hours straight only to wake up 99% convinced that, dude, you have meningitis?

Man I hate when that happens.