Family, Health, History, Music, Songs, TV, Uncategorized

Does It Hurt and Have A Temperature?

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Today’s post comes from Wessew.

That is line from a 1963 Bayer Children’s aspirin commercial. The little boy makes an inquiry of his playmate’s health and receives reassurance from her mother that things will be fine. His delightful response? “Mothers are like that. Yeah, they are.”

With the C-19 pandemic, many of us have heard similar screening questions. “Pain? Temperature?”

My construction work at medical facilities requires a negative response to gain entrance into the building. I’m quite sure that over these past months that I’ve had my temperature taken a hundred times and it has consistently been 97.5. This is a surprise, as I recollect normal body temperature being 98.6 or did Keith mis-inform me with the lyric in his 1967 song:

“Hey, 98.6, it’s good to have you back again! Oh, hey, 98.6, her lovin’ is the medicine that saved me! Oh, I love my baby!”

Somehow “Hey 97.5” doesn’t work as a lyric.

 

Do you have a favorite fever song?

62 thoughts on “Does It Hurt and Have A Temperature?”

  1. Thanks, Wessew, it’s great to see you back in full swing on the trail.

    About body temperature, funny that you should ask. After 55 years in this country, I still do normal body temperature in Celcius. I was at urgent care on Friday, temp. 99.6º, sounded fine to me. At the ER on Saturday night it was 98.6º. After six hours there running various tests, a CT Scan and an IV, I was released with instructions to come back if my problem recurred or persisted. Now, at home, I’m 97.6º. Guess I’m back to some sort of normal? We’ll see.

    Don’t know that this is a favorite, but it was the first thing that came to mind:

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    2. Rita Coolidge’s version of this song has always been my favorite. I think that is Booker T Jones on keyboards – he was her brother-in-law, IIRC.

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  5. last week i was run down at the warehouse

    there’s nothing like physical activity to let you know that you are not what you used to be

    my hired hand is an odd guy
    describes himself as ocd and it is his mantra
    he wore a mask before the covid so needless to say he quit when the vivid hit and came back recently with the condition that he could call the day over if he felt uncomfortable

    he just his back lifting boxes(that’s what we’re doing ) so he left it up to me to do the lifting

    well last week i was dragging on monday and tuesday and as that was uncharacteristic
    he was sure i had the virus and said he’d come back after i tested negative

    testing is an interesting sport these days and after arriving at persicely 8 as directed i was told the line was full and i’d have to get in it to work to the front and get tested
    at 12 i was on my way and 4 days later had my test results back and called my guy to let him know it was safe to come back

    along the way another guy stopped in to buy some stuff( windmills and aromatic cedar for building a sauna) and offered to work for stuff. i took him up on it and what a difference. a big farm kid from iowa that i love working with make lifting look and feel easy

    gotta find more stuff to keep him around til i’m done…

    yesterday my daughter with grandson was over to do the going away backyard get together sending off daughter in theater back to chicago after summer hiatus to our house. we were glad to have her back because her internship at a theater in chicago made that seem unlikely but with covid all work was online so she sublet her apartment and came home. well the punchline is that when tara got home at 6 her husband had just received a call the one of the 2 guys on his crew (they install windows) tested positive and so he is very concerned and we were all in contact with tara who was in contact with him and the freak out began….
    calls to grandma who came over to join us and son who got out of arizona to avoid nutso virus spread there were placed to tell them to wash up good and hunker down til test results are in

    my fever has been normal but i think i had the virus back in february before the doctors even knew what it was

    i asked them to rest me them and they passed because i didn’t have all 6 symptoms on their list

    i think they missed it.

    i ran a high fever for a week and tried to go back to get the antibody test to see if i was a post virus guy but doctors office short staffed help misdirected me through the maze and i got the wrong tests.

    my mask business is off and running this week and it feels like a good time to be in the health care biz

    i was laughing wes at last weeks reference to the fargo vfw and the layers of pee soaked flooring you had to tear up

    my dad and his buddies defiantly had residue down there about 80 years deep in the mix.
    they lived at the elks and the vfw and other watering holes in fargo where drinking peeing and adding to the semicircle that surrounds urinals the world over
    some places mop it up with disinfectant in fargo they just put a new layer of linoleum down every 5 years. heck in 50 years you only lose 4 or 5 inches right?

    fever in fargo today is an issue with north dakota trump bandwagon governors lack of leadership do be careful

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    1. As ever, tim, following that stream of consciousness wakes me up. At first I thought you were telling us that you were run down by a loader or something. I hope no one gets sick at your house.

      We talked to a contractor last week, who also thinks he had COVID in January, and describes similar symptoms. He said it was the sickest he had ever been.

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      2. My daughter was quite ill with a strange flu-like illness in March. She wonders about it now. My erstwife had an illness almost a year ago that presented symptoms identical to covid-19, so we wonder about her, too.

        My sense is that this thing might have several strains that don’t behave exactly the same. And/or it has been evolving and changing.

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  6. Our mayor and sheriff decided it wasn’t right to not have the annual parade for the 4th of July . Our total virus count for the county was at 62 on July 3. They had the parade, and a couple thousand people showed up, standing maskless, shoulder to shoulder like workers in the Sioux Falls meat packing plant. Now our county virus total is 164.

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      2. I will be putting together my experience as a c-19 vaccine trial volunteer.
        Also adopting birds
        Also being a “critical worker”
        Also racism at work.
        Also Trump (ugg)

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  8. I was pretty strict with our kids that the only way they could stay home from school was if they had a fever. Daughter often complained of feeling ill, but I insisted she go to school anyway since she never spiked a fever. I had quite a bit of guilt after I discovered that the digital thermometer I used for years never registered over 97.6, and I had sent her to school when she was sick.

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    2. One of my main drives as a kid was to avoid being sent to Sunday School for religious instruction. In earlier posts I’ve mentioned various ploys I used. One that worked several times was faking a fever. I’d tell my mother I was too ill to go. She’d check my temperature to make sure I wasn’t faking it. When she was out of the room, I’d spin the thermometer bulb while holding it with a pillow case. The friction created enough heat to confirm I was unfit to go to Sunday School.

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      1. I learned the converse of that from a nurse. If you want to lower your temp, taken with an oral thermometer, you touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and breathe in with your mouth open for a couple of minutes.

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  9. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I seconded tim’s selection of Peggy Lee and “Fever” so that is all I have to say about that. My temp has been taken daily, usually running 97.7.

    In 1983 my dad was hospitalized with a kidney infection, running a temperature of 106.9. My aunt called me and said the Dr. thought his prognosis was dire and that he would not live through such a high temp. She thought I should come home. I told my supervisor that I had to leave because my father was critically ill. I drove the 2 hours home. By the time I arrived the fever broke to something like 102, but it did a lot of brain damage, however, he lived another 13 years. When I got back to work my supervisor disciplined me for leaving suddenly because Dad did not die. If he had died, this guy thought it would have be OK to have left.

    That one never made sense to me. What do you even say to that?

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      1. Probably a wiser option than a nasty retort considering the situation, but it does make you wonder how a person like that would ever be put in a supervisory position. Unfortunately, stranger things have happened, look at who is in the White House.

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  10. In this senior citizen housing complex, they are justifiably terrified that the virus might get in. Each day an aide comes around to check each of us for blood oxygen level and temperature.

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  14. A propos our discussion over the weekend, I just saw this reported in the NYT. Fifteen years ago, Stephenie Meyer released her best-selling novel “Twilight.” Tomorrow she’s releasing “Midnight Sun,” a new novel that tells the same story from Edward’s perspective. I haven’t read “Twilight,” but apparently Edward is a vampire. Here’s a link to the NYT article of an interview with the author:

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  15. Son was sick with a fever back in February. As were a lot of other officers. They’re all pretty sure they had it too, but yeah, can’t get tested for antibodies.

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    1. For a nation that claims to have the greatest health care system in the world, that’s a disgrace. An utter failure of the current administration no matter what DT says.

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  20. This was nagging at me all day long… FINALLY found it on YouTube. Couldn’t help myself. Song is at the 2-minute mark. If you have time, watch the rest of the clip as I’ve never been able to hear Don’t be Cruel without thinking of this:

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      1. I stumbled across him on tv years and years ago. I haven’t followed him or anything but I just never could get either of those songs and his presentation of them out of my head.

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  21. Another take on this one. With Garth Hudson on organ. Wikipedia says:

    “Chest Fever” is a song recorded by the Band on its 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink. It is, according to Peter Viney, a historian of the group, “the Big Pink track that has appeared on most subsequent live albums and compilations”, second only to “The Weight”. The music for the piece was written by guitarist Robbie Robertson. Total authorship is typically credited solely to Robertson, although the lyrics, according to Levon Helm, were originally improvised by Levon Helm and Richard Manuel, telling the story of a man who becomes sick when he is spurned by the woman he loves.

    Robertson has since said the lyrics were nonsensical, used only while the instrumental tracks were recorded. “I’m not sure that I know the words to ‘Chest Fever’; I’m not even so sure there are words to ‘Chest Fever’.” He has also stated the entirety of the song does not make sense.

    At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, the Band performed on the final day, between Ten Years After and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. They opened the set with “Chest Fever”.

    The song featured a dramatic solo organ intro played by Garth Hudson. Writing in the 3rd edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Paul Evans stated that “The organ mastery of ‘Chest Fever’ unleashed the Band’s secret weapon, Garth Hudson.” The introduction is based on Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. In live performances, this solo evolved into an improvisation drawing from numerous musical styles and lasting several minutes. “When Levon Helm has complained about the share out of royalties at this period, this is the song he quotes,” states Viney. “His theme is that Garth’s contribution was always grossly under-estimated and under-credited. As he says, ‘what do you remember about ‘Chest Fever’ – the lyrics or the organ part?'”

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