It's too motherfucking hot. Seriously. I can't handle it.

I think I had heatstroke on Sunday night. I played two tennis matches on Sunday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon (won the first one, lost the second and ended up in second place for the tournament). The second one was the one that killed me. Three sets, way too hot (indoor courts with no air conditioning--at that point, worse than being outside), and demoralizing in the end when I lost 5-7 in the third set. I had moments where I thought I would pull a Pete Sampras and chuck up (or is that upchuck?) my lunch onto the court. It was that hot and exhausting, even though I had been drinking water continuously.

After it was over, I immediately took a cold shower. That helped, as did the ride home in the air-conditioned car. When I got out of the car and walked up the three (unairconditioned) flights of stairs to our (unairconditioned) apartment I got lightheaded and felt incredibly nauseous again but didn't throw up (although there was leaning over the toilet bowl). I crashed and watched Bull Durham while drinking more water and it seemed to help. We cooked dinner together (yes, over the hot stove) but after dinner I was still feeling terrible. Finally, The Scientist suggested we go see a movie, mostly for the air conditioning. The walk down three flights of stairs and across the street to the car nearly did me in, as did the car ride (let's add motion to the nausea) and the walk from the parking lot to the theater. I actually stood strategically near a bush so I could unobtrusively puke into it if needed.

Fortunately, it was not needed. I made it into the theater and after a brief interlude in the ladies' room, took my seat at The Importance of Being Earnest. The Scientist was not by my side, however, as he was seeing Enigma. Yes, we saw separate movies. We don't do that very often, but occasionally we'll be in the mood for different things and rather than one of us sacrificing for the other, we'll go our separate ways and meet in the lobby after. It worked out really well this time. I saw something amusing and lighthearted and The Scientist saw something about math (ok, WWII codebreaking, but in the mood I was in it just sounded like math). Twenty minutes into the movie (about 40 minutes after getting to the theater--we arrived early to take maximum advantage of the air conditioning) I started feeling better and halfway through the movie I was completely back to normal. I think I threw my internal thermometer out of whack and just couldn't fully cool off in our 90-degree apartment (who could?).

I had another tennis match on Monday and experienced a mini-relapse. I'm sure it didn't help that I lost, but I had a lot of the same symptoms--nausea, shakiness, headache. I took care of this episode by fully cooling off after the match was over. When the sun went down, a wind came up and it cooled down about 20 degrees. I also drank lots of water, and had a virgin strawberry daiquiri and Cobb salad at TGI Friday's. It was my team's choice of after-match restaurants. I don't usually go to places like that--we'd rather patronize a local place, not a national chain. Plus, I've had bad experiences with the food (dry and tasteless vs. greasy and heavy), but my food was great this time. Of course, it's hard to screw up a salad (especially if it has yummy things like avocado, bleu cheese, bacon, olives, and chicken on it) and really hard to screw up a virgin strawberry daiquiri. I wished it could have been a non-virgin daiquiri, but I knew that in my state alcohol was not a good idea. If it didn't make me more sick and dehydrated, it would have made me drunk after a few sips. Sometimes that's a good thing. In this case, not. I was happy that I avoided the extreme sickness of Sunday night and skipped tennis on Tuesday to recover. I went to drill on Wednesday and had a great time, completely back to normal, with no lasting problems.