Oh, yeah. I only survived by pure luck. And I mean, I did have the internet. I could have looked up how hot a fever can get, before it’s really dangerous. But really deep ignorance has a cleverness all its own, in terms of making sure you avoid doing anything sensible.

I never actually had the thought of “hey, could the temperature of the fever itself actually endanger my life?” I knew people died of the flu sometimes, but I somehow thought of it in the same context that people die of coronavirus style infections. In other words, I thought the only way a coughing-and-wheezing style virus would kill you would be a lack of oxygen, from inflamed lung tissue, total exhaustion of the breathing muscles, etc. I knew enough about my own condition to be pretty sure I didn’t have fluid in my lungs, and that I was getting plenty of oxygen. And I was still able to walk around and stuff, so I knew I wasn’t on the verge of deadly exhaustion.

So I just sat around the house, taking cough drops for my hacking cough and over-the-counter painkillers for my tremendous muscle aches and headache. Annnnnd I could have just gone off sleep, never to wake up again, never even seeing what the new millennium was like. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, indeed.