Don't Double Dip.

[citrakayah]

You've been told never to get COVID. You've been told never to get the flu. Let me tell you that they go even worse together. I somehow managed to get both at once when visiting family for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I got it from--probably not my parents, since they came down after I did, and it couldn't have been from a third party because I only went outside in isolated public parks. One of my other relatives seems the most likely possibility.

It was nasty. I've never had body aches from being sicky before. Injuries, yes; I've fallen down my share of slopes (and off a cliff, once); that hurt. But for two days I had trouble moving because I was aching, and at night even with four blankets I had chills. Then I had nausea, and the second worst case of congestion I've ever had. The symptoms lasted a week, though there was a gap of two days when I seemed to be fine.

Luckily, things have cleared up now.

As far as classes, I'm in the tail end of things. Finals have been going well--aside from my group presentations. Which, given that they're what I'm doing for two thirds of my classes, is a rather large wrinkle in things. It's not affecting my grades, but it's still been frustrating. For one class, my group-mate got injured and so I'm having to work by myself. Not their fault, but unfortunate for us both.

For the other? I put in a ton of effort, read like fifteen papers, but they ended up not using much of the research I put in to try and help them and their own work was, in my opinion, kind of sloppy. There were a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors. They didn't give really in-depth explanations of what they were talking about but gave superficial surface-level stuff you'd teach to a middle-schooler.

Given that we're graduate students, that's pretty frustrating.

Family is doing well. Unfortunately, I won't be with them for Hanukkah, because of finals. This is actually the first year in a while I haven't been able to visit them for it. Still, they visited today and I got to enjoy their company.

Comments

[elinox]

Glad you're finally feeling better, that sick-cocktail sounds absolutely awful!

[scatteredshells]

Oh no! I'm glad you're finally better, that sounded just awful! :(

[lhexan]

Commiserations on the double whammy. It reminds me of the time in 2016 I caught a two-week flu, followed by two weeks of mild pneumonia -- after returning from a trip to China, no less. But a double whammy with Covid and the flu would be even worse.

Group projects are awful, because typically one person ends up doing the lion's share of the work. I'm astounded anyone would still assign them in graduate school.

Remind me what you're studying? I'm back in graduate school for mathematics, myself. With yesterday's final, I'm now a third of the way through my most difficult year here.