Went Viral

I spent a good chunk of my week off from work being ill. And I didn't just feel ill either - I had an actual fever of 103, which isn't THAT serious, but it's still somewhat unpleasant. It's a good thing I wasn't trying to climb Mount Everest last week - I don't think I would have made it to the summit.

But it's kind of ironic. I went through about a year of chemotherapy, and one of the consequences of chemo is that your white blood cell count varies between low and zero (normal chemo gives you low white cell counts, while the lethal-dose chemo gives you zero white cells). So there I was, little more than a large walking agar dish, and I never got sick. No fevers, no infections, nuthin.

And now, with a full complement of white blood cells and all, I couldn't take a few days off from work without some stupid virus having Spring Break somewhere in my innards.

Still, there's sick and then there's sick. This was just annoying and inconvenient. It wasn't like I was planning on climbing Mount Everest, after all.

Would I? Climb Mount Everest, I mean? I've always had an odd interest in high-altitude mountaineering. I don't think I really want to go forth and actually do it, but I find it fascinating at least as long as I'm lying comfortably in bed reading about it.

One reason it appeals to me is that I'm a jargon junkie, and mountaineering is crammed full of interesting jargon. The Hinterstosser Traverse, the Black Pyramid, the First Step, the Second Step, the Yellow Band, the Western Buttress, the Ruta Normale, the South Col. And those are just geological features, to say nothing of things like seracs, couloirs, laybacks, descendeurs, jumars, and Advanced Base Camp. It's fascinating. The only field of human endeavor that has better jargon, in my opinion, is aerospace, where the mere idea of a convergent-divergent supersonic de Laval nozzle gives me chills.

But I'm not particularly fond of heights, and I'm not sure that halfway up the Lhotse Face is the right place to discover that heights make me barf. I once saw a poster of two climbers traversing an ice field high on K2, and the exposure was absolutely breathtaking. Could I stand it? I mean, assuming I could get to that altitude without imploding like the core of a Type-II supernova, could I hold it together psychologically or would I gibber and walk right off the edge?