Last time, I described my hospital stay after a surprise pneumonia diagnosis. Unfortunately, I wish that was the end of the troubles.
I wasn't getting better. I was told to check in with my primary care doctor, who I actually hadn't met in person after moving over to her early in the Pandemic.
Great introduction: "Hi Doc, I have pneumonia, and I feel like crap."
So she talks to me for a bit, and decides that after the course of antibiotics I've taken, I should feel great. So on to antibiotic treatment round two! And this time, she lets me know that if I'm still feeling like shit by Friday, then I need to come back and talk to her again.
Well, the past few days have been miserable.
I don't love talking about the specifics of my job, but I think I want to tell a bit of a story, mostly to contextualize why today feels worse than spending eighteen hours as a roomate of a delusional man going thorugh withdrawals while in the worst pain of his life.
I'm responsible for a fairly large piece of infrastructure at work. After it was performing poorly a few years ago, I took a month to do a top-to-bottom rewrite of the service, and now it is something all our business runs through. We have a third party dependency that has been extremely flaky as we've increased the ammount we use it, and sometimes it cuts out completely. Over the past month, this has lead to processes that usually take minutes to take hours, which is far from ideal. Acknowledged.
Early last week, I took up the task of doing everything in my power to get this system under control. I read a bunch of newly released documentaiton on our dependency, made a ton of updates and improvements to the system, and was realy proud of the job I'd done.
The evening I released the big fix was the night before I went into the hospital. That next morning, I was messaging my boss to make sure the system was up and running, since I couldn't get onto our VPN from my phone, but it was practically the first weekday in a month that I hadn't had urgent alerts pinging my phone (which I should get even if I wasn't on the VPN.)
The fix had worked. While I was in the hospital, a colleague (who didn't know I was out) pinged me to let me know that the test servers were running very quickly, and he was appreciative.
Throughout the hospital stay, the one thing I was really hanging onto was how pleased I was that I'd managed to resolve this debilitating crisis at work. I imagined going into the Thrusday meeting and saying that it was the first calm week in a while, and everyone being pretty pleased they'd no longer be receiving alerts about the system going down.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday go by swimmingly, and lasst night I released a new update.
I still haven't figured out exactly what happened, or even if the update had anything to do with it, but on Thursday morning three services we rely on that seemed to all go down at once under some heavy load. And the system was backed up for hours processing the backlog.
So today, instead of coming into the Thursday meeting a hero, I was panicing while I tried to fix the crisis, while running back and forth to the bathroom with nausea. It sucked. It was all pretty much resolved by the Thursday meeting I'd been excited about just a day before. But the meeting was awful. There was a mini-lecture from a co-worker (who only knows about the system, and not the pneumonia or anything else). Everything that was brought up was fair, and logical, and reasonable. But I am glad the meeting was remote so I could just shut up, mute myself, and not have anyone looking at my face.
So that was today. I was nauseous, couldn't eat, fucked up at work, and was reminded of it.
Tomorrow, if I'm not somehow feeling better, I check back in with the Doctor and you get a Pneumonia III.