Sick, Not Dying

So I've been pretty sick lately. For those interested, I'll do a quick run down of the symptoms:

• Constant fatigue
• Virtigo/Dizziness
• Stiff neck
• Fainting (just once, but it was scary)
• Overheating
• Nausea

After the fainting episode, (long story, no I don't want to talk about it) I went to the Expat Medical Centre to have a pro check me out. The problem is that those symptoms match a lot of things, both scary and benign. The doc figured I had <code>BPPV</code>, which is a scary-sounding acronym meaning my ears are out of whack and I need to do some special exercises to make them work properly again. I did said exercises and some of the dizziness/virtigo went away, but not all of it. The other stuff is still around.

So, back to the doc. This time they took lots of blood and tested for a bunch of stuff. In order of scariness:

• Sugar levels (Diabetes)
• Hemoglobin (low oxygenation)
• A thyroid condition
• Mononucleosis
• Hepetitis

They also did an ECG just to be sure my heart isn't broken somewhere. I was told to wait about a week for all of the results to come in, and today they called, asking me to come in and talk to the doctor. In the past, they'd always just told me that my results came back fine, so this was kinda scary, hence my somewhat ominus tweet.

But, after freaking out over this for a few hours, I went into the office and the doc tells me that everything came back fine... except for the mono test. For that, the results said that I had had mono in the past, which is weird because I've never felt like this before. The doc ordered another quick test, this one to confirm if I do in fact have it at present, so we can rule it out or not.

"But Dan", you might say, "how the hell could you contract mono when you don't cheat on your girlfriend and you don't share drinks?" Well I asked the doc the same thing, and she said that in the Netherlands, people don't wash glasses properly in the bars. Instead of using soap and hot water, they use a tiny brush and cold water, for about 2 seconds on all glasses. Frankly it's disgusting. The thinking is that if I do in fact have mono (and we don't know for sure yet), it's likely that I got it from this nasty process, or via Christina when she shared a drink with someone. Apparently it's common for people to get it and not show symptoms.

There's also one thing that I keep forgetting to ask the doc to test for: West Nile Virus/Fever. Apparently there was an outbreak in parts of Greece a few years ago, and contrary to popular belief it's not always fatal. There are in fact a number of subsets that just make you feel terrible. If this mono thing doesn't pan out, I'll have to remember to ask them about that.

So, for those of you who asked, thank you for your concern, but it looks like whatever I have isn't going to kill me. I'll post here when I know more.