Happy Black Friday, everyone! Thankfully I’ve learned over the years to do my Christmas shopping months early, so I haven’t needed to buy anything, but it’s still nice to have a day to sit around and relax with the family.

Or at least it would be, if I hadn’t woken up feeling flushed and exhausted. From the moment I woke up today, all I wanted was cold drinks. The coldest drinks. Powerade, water, soda, (mostly soda); I just needed to drink as much as possible. No foolin’, I’m pretty sure I went through six liters of diet soda this morning.

It eventually occurred to me (by which I mean my wife told me) to check my temperature, and it was up to 103 degrees. We called my doctor’s on-call nurse, and after some back and forth realized that there had been a misunderstanding about my steroid prescription. While that might have been the cause of the high temperature, her medical advice was to keep an eye on my temperature and make sure it didn’t go any higher, and otherwise to just get some rest.

That all turned out to be pretty good advice, because after laying in bed for approximately eight hours, I woke up with a normal temperature of 97 degrees. And a little sweat. Okay, maybe more than a little sweat.

Actor’s recreation of my post-nap state

All right, fine. I woke up with so much sweat that Haley and I had to immediately change every sheet and pillowcase, including the special sheet and pillow protectors that we’ve been using since chemo started, because I had soaked through absolutely every layer of everything we had.

After a cool shower and change of clothes for me, I’m feeling a good bit better (certainly less thirsty). According to my local medical expert Dr. Wife, this type of rapid fever and sweating is a common Lymphoma symptom, just crazy fevers out of nowhere as my body tries to fight the disease in my blood.

So the day was a little bit “wasted,” but if there’s a day to do that, the day after Thanksgiving is probably the day for it. The rest of the family spent their day playing games and resting, so it wasn’t like there were many family activities to miss.

And now that I’m feeling better we can continue with this week’s tradition of dinner followed by a Fast & Furious movie (for the purposes of this week, they will be referred to as Fast & Turkeyous). Tonight we wrap up the series, learning the Fate of the Turkeyous. I’m betting it involves a lot of destroyed cars and the Rock throwing someone through a ceiling.