I am just getting over a vicious head cold that came all the way from Planet Death to murder me, but I fought it off with over-the-counter pain killers and my one superpower, naps.

I’m pretty sure I caught it from somebody on the ferry coming back from Isle Royale. It’s a three and a half hour ride and I was sitting in a cabin with very little ventilation with forty or fifty other people the whole time, so if one of them was incubating the Planet Death head cold, I could have easily contracted it from them then.

I wasn’t feeling too bad until Tuesday when the bug infected my sinuses so deeply that all my teeth hurt, like having an ice cream headache but in my teeth all the time. The only thing that saved me from grabbing a pliers from my tool box and yanking all my teeth out to make it stop was a bottle of OTC painkillers, recommended to me by a podiatrist for arthritis pain. Turned out it worked great on ice cream toothaches, too.

I finally started to feel human again on Friday except for one tooth way in the back. It remained super-sensitive to hot and cold, and I couldn’t chew on that side at all because the tooth felt like the end of a hot poker in my jaw if I bit down on anything that got back there. When my dentist tapped on the tooth with a steel tool I tried to jump out of the chair. Didn’t even have to think about it, it just happened. “ooo, you’re going to need a root canal,” he said, and referred me to the specialist who did that thing.

So my killer head cold not only infected my sinuses, gave me ice cream toothaches, and knocked me out for three days, I also ended up with a root canal which I’m totally going to blame on the head cold, too. It can’t be a coincidence that I just happened to need a root canal to clear out the infection in my tooth that made itself known only one day after the infection in my head started to clear up.

Can’t think of an ending to this story, other than I hate getting sick. Totally blows. F-triple-minus, do not recommend.