1) If you’re having really painful achy joints and your mother finds a heating pad and brings it over to you, it will help.  It will also make you more popular with your cats than you ever dreamed you would be.  You will then have four heating pads instead of just one.

2) It’s very interesting to have a fever of 104.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this before in my adult life.  I think that’s a temperature at which I should by rights have been delirious, but I don’t think I was; it was more as though my brain and  body had gone into fourth gear … my pulse was very fast, and thoughts were coming so quickly that I couldn’t sort them out properly, although the thought process itself was perfectly coherent.  I did have a suspicion, though, that if I’d tried to speak, it wouldn’t have come out correctly.  So I didn’t try.

3) The amount of sweat resulting from the breaking of such a fever is nothing less than astonishing.  Sheets, pillowcases, and two bath towels, all wringing wet.  And of course changing the bed linens is exactly what you feel like doing after something like that, right?  Right.

4) If you have an illness that involves sudden onsets of symptoms, and you have any question in your mind about what might happen next, you should assume the worst and lock yourself in the bathroom, just to be on the safe side.

5)  But if, like me, you figure out #4 just five seconds too late — another benefit to being a homeowner is the ability to do emergency laundry in the middle of the night in the comfort of one’s own laundry room, without violating “after 10 PM” noise regulations.