As I woke up last Friday, I felt pain in my throat. I thought it was just my tonsils acting up again and it would get better in a day or two. But around 9AM I started feeling feverish. Since it was Friday I just took the day off and planned to rest. I ordered food online and just lazed around the whole day. But as the night came, I started feeling chilly and my sore throat worsened. I slept off early. But around 2AM my fever shot up. I checked and it was around 100℉. I somehow managed to get up and took some paracetamol. I couldn’t sleep for the next 2 hours.
The weekend was not any better. I barely got up from the bed. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about office so I just rested. But my fever was not going away. I mean it was going down after the medicines and then again coming back up. Same thing happened on Monday but I couldn’t take a leave due to an important committment. But on Monday night I started feeling really restless. The fever went up to 102.5℉ and I started having the worst migraine of my life. All of this while lying alone in my room with no one around. I had grown weaker because of loss of appetite and was severely dehydrated. Monday night was scary. I was checking the time after every 10 minutes and was just hoping for the night to pass so I could go see a doctor in the morning. I couldn’t sleep the entire night.
So yesterday morning I went to the hospital. Met the doctor, he said its probably viral flu and the migraine got aggrevated because of dehydration. He told me to get some blood tests done - the usual LFT, CBC and Hemogram etc and see him in the evening. I got them done and in the evening I met him again with the reports. He said its mostly flu but my liver is under stress and has swollen and he wants to repeat the LFT and CBC again on Saturday. He gave some medicines for the fever and headache and that was all. After taking the meds I felt a bit better and my migraine subsided too. I will need to see on Saturday if the reports get better. Honestly, I feel any small illness after covid has become a lot more serious for me. I didn’t use to get this much sick before covid. I mean I used to get fever or cold maybe once in a blue moon but now its so frequent and it gets so bad. I got one in December ‘25 and one in March this year and both were equally scary. Yash, Kirti and Ishu kept checking up on me and that meant a lot.
I am still halfway through the book about regrets of the dying and I will write about it later. But I do wanted to write about another thing. Just when I had thought that I was over my ‘Courage’ bandwagon, I was watching the show few days back while I was sick and I found a very interesting episode. Let me write down the gist and what I thought about it.
So, the episode starts with a masked figure coming up to Courage and saying “Dogs are evil” and basically beats the hell out of him.
Then we move to the scene where they are having dinner and Muriel asks the masked figure to tell something about herself. She mentions that she is from the other side of the ‘track’ and she had a friend named Bunny who fell in love with a gangster who treats her like she’s a slave. She mentions that he is a lowdown mad dog and when he found out that Kitty (the masked character) was trying to help Bunny escape, the mad dog threatned her life. She was forced to leave her home and her bestfriend Bunny still has to be with him forcefully. She keeps telling “Dogs are evil” and throughtout the episode she keeps beating Courage for ofcourse he is a dog.
At night when Kitty goes to sleep she takes off her mask and seeing this Courage gets scared and starts thinking that she is a monster and will eat Muriel and Eustace.
He takes it upon himself to save them. He locks Kitty in the room and takes the mouse toy that Kitty was having and decides to take it to the police. But he sees a text written below the toy - “To Kitty, Love Bunny”. Seeing this he goes to the other side of the ‘tracks’ to find out who Bunny is. He finds Bunny forcefully sitting in a room and being mistreated by the mad dog and his gang. Even when she tries to flee and run, the mad dogs catch her and bring her back. She even yells “You dogs are all the same.”
When Courage shows up himself to save Bunny, she gets frightened thinking this is another dog trying to harm her. But Courage shows up the toy from Kitty he had been holding and this made Bunny trust him. After a short chase with the mad dog, Courage saves Bunny and she is finally reunited with Kitty. We see Bunny running towards Kitty and saying “That dog saved my life!” to which Kitty replies “I was wrong Bunny. Not all dogs are bad”.
Now there are many small intersting sub-topics in this episode like abuse getting neglected etc but the one that I wanted to highlight in this post is that this episode teaches us that some of people’s hate comes from their own trauma but also it’s legitimate. Courage met Kitty who hated dogs because she herself had a terrible experience with a dog but it was through Courage’s kindness and by helping her reunite with her best friend Bunny that she was able to open up her heart and realize not all dogs are bad. It can be a little hard to respect anyone that has hate for you. But to understand their trauma I think we need to have a little courage and open up as well.
Courage’s smile at the end makes me happy that knowing all the abuse and dangers he went through he still helped Kitty and Bunny reunite together and gave them a new perspective of dogs. Hate can be logical but helping someone who hates you is an act of courage.
The episode is called ‘The Mask’. I couldn’t find the full episode on youtube but it’s available on Hotstar - season 4 episode 7.
I wrote a similar story in this blogpost months back when I was feeling the same way. I was not talking to anyone yet there were people who still tried to understanding my situation and slowly I opened up to them as well. It was nice seeing this same learning in a Courage episode. This show is S-tier afterall. I am still not able to find Courage action figures or merchandise though 😭
