I am still alive. You know that your liveness status may be under question when your doctor suddenly starts asking questions like "have you been abroad recently?", "have you been swimming in a lake or river", then goes on to make sure they have your mobile phone number before taking my blood and making me rush it down the hill myself to the hospital, as we'd missed the morning pickup and they felt that saving 24 hours would matter.

Then later, when I was back at the doctors, he had this expression on his face, something that was familiar. It came to me at the weekend. Not concern, excitement. There he is, a front-line support person whose normal problem is "I get a cough after I smoke", or "I fell off my bike and now it hurts to move", and suddenly he sees something unusual. It was like the time when our image rendering service came back with a half rendered image and it was the first first fun support call for ages; tracked it down to the java.net HTTP package "correcting" the content-length header if the response got cut short in the initial 1536 TCP packet, and had to add our own secret x-content-length header to deal with someone's HTTP stack thinking that a mismatch between content-length and content's length being an error in the header, not transmission problems. Fun problems that make your day interesting.

Everything started last Sunday, woke up with sore muscles. I'd been evicted from my own bed by a small child who came in to fidget, and spent the night in a child's bed instead, so blamed that. But it didn't go away, and then on monday a fever and bit of a rash, or to be precise, bleeding under the skin, for which there is word and a wikipedia entry: Petechia.

On the list of infections which cause this there are things like Bolivian Hemorrhagic Fever, Cerebral Malaria and Ebola, so you can see why the doctor was chirpy. Not your normal problem. Hopefully it's just H1N1 Swine Flu, as that will need less explaining in hour house than Congenital Syphilis.