Saturday, May 17, 2008

My Exact Symptoms of Parvo B19 virus (Fifth's Disease)

  • First Day of actual Symptoms: Tuesday, May 13th - I went to work as usual. Appetite was decreased, felt more tired than usual. As the day went on, I felt progressively more cold and achey with a fever that developed by evening and the usual fever delerium. I also felt nauseated and ate nothing that evening. I went to sleep an hour early wrapped in a warm blanket to bake out whatever virus I had.
  • Day two: I woke up still achey but my fever seemed to have disappeared. (I didn't bother to take any tylenol but I did take 2 Airborne tablets the previous day and continued to take over 2000 mg of vitamin C every day for the rest of the week.) My appetite seemed normal, but my back and shoulders seemed a little achey still.
  • Day three: Thursday - My achiness was not as bad but my eyes felt like if I rolled my eyeballs back in my head, they hurt a little. I might have had a headache but was otherwise basically okay.
  • Day Four: Friday - I woke up and took a hot shower. When I got out I realized I was covered with a rash. My arms looked like they were sunburned with white splotches and very tiny hive bumps. My legs also were red down to the tops of my feet but not as much. Mostly the red spots were where my hair follicles were like I had a shaving rash but my thighs were all red and splotched and my torso front and back with the classic "lace-like" rash as described in wikipedia. This is when I identified my virus as Parvo B19 virus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parvovirus_B19 As the day wore on, my rash began to fade, but started to itch a little, particularly my feet that were encased in socks and shoes. It wasn't too hard to avoid scratching. My feet felt like they were swelling badly and my eyes felt very dry. By evening, my appetite had fully returned.
  • Day Five: Saturday - I woke with my joints hurting so I tried to sleep as much as I could to try to finally be rid of this virus. When I finally got up, I found that my hands and feet were swollen like balloons and my toes and soles really itched. I took a shower and rubbed between my toes with the damp towel and noticed my rash was completely gone. If I stretched my fingers on my hands, my skin felt so taunt that the middle knuckles turned white like the image in wikipedia.
  • Day Six: Sunday - Swelling is mostly gone, only some slight itchiness remains on hands and feet. By Monday, I felt back to myself.

Summary: Day 1 - Flu-like symptoms - nausea, fatigue, delirium, fever. Day 2-4 - Achiness, tiredness, joint pain, decreased appetite. Day 4 - "Lace-like" red rash all over the whole body except for palms and soles. Children = pronounced "slapped cheek rash". Day 5 - swollen hands and feet, slight achiness and join pain when waking. Symptoms will likely be more pronounced with a compromised immune system. To boost the immunity take lots of vitamin C and some Airborne, and get lots of sleep.

***These are the symptoms as experienced by myself. I have not yet confirmed that this is the Parvo B19 virus yet, but my test results will come back in a few days to confirm it. The parvovirus has been spreading through my community for the past several weeks. We have had numerous pregnant women coming in to be tested for it claiming that their children or their neighbor's children were infected with the virus. I blame one of the kids that came in with their mother... I remember at least one or two having the "Slapped cheek" look. So far none of the pregnant mothers have tested positive for the disease, but about half of them have tested positive for the immunity.

*****Monday May 19th: I got my results back today from my blood test. I tested positive for IgM antibodies to Parvo. That means that the blood test confirmed that I had the disease when tested on Friday. I was negative for my IgG antibodies, but I should start making those this week and then be immune to this disease for as long as my IgG antibodies last. IgG = GOOD (immunity). IgM = BAD (disease).

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

New HAT material: SUNWELL

When the patch first came out, my anxious guild eagerly set foot inside of Sunwell. We were greeted with a familiar looking massive robot. Warning flags immediately should go up when you see one of these nearly indestructible constructs. If you recall Heroic Botanica, what is the most devastating point? The hallway with the two constructs that spam their purple blasts of energy all over and can often wipe the group even multiple times if not all of the players are on their toes for these metal heartless mobs. Again, in Heroic Mechanar, which mobs are the most challenging? The large constructs that slam their fists and immediately enrage afterward and beat massively on the tank. Anyways, once again, Blizzard places their beloved destructive robots into their new quaint beautiful instance. My guild devised a strategy for these robots.

Sunwell Robots: Divide the raid up into stacked groups that are spread out. This minimizes the damage from the electric charges. DPS him down.

Sunwell Robot + Scout + multiple class mob of 7-8: This is handled by first waiting for the scout to be at a good spot near the raid, easy for all range to hit. The scout is then mind soothed and distracted to stop him, a timer counts down, and all range dps blast him apart before he can agro the giant robot. The mob automatically agros the moment the scout gets hit, so the 3-4 mages in the group each sheep a target, the pretty winged beast gets slept, and the tanks pick up the vindicators, and the hunter too if there aren't enough sheep to sheep him. The hunter needs to be faced away from the raid to keep him from multishotting over the whole raid. Also, one of the mobs will fear (Dawn or Dusk, I think it's the Dusk) so pull everything back away from any non agro'd robots.

Okay after playing around with trash and mastering it finally... HAT moves onto Kalecgos. We spent SOO much time on him the first few weeks.. 9 days total, four hours each day, more than 32 attempts each day... until we finally downed him. Several times we ALMOST downed him, but the last portal didn't open, or a portal gets skipped messing up the rotation, or some other strange thing happens.. someone disconnects etc... anyways... We finally got him down and now we are working on our Brutallus strategies. Yesterday Sunwell reset and we were expecting another full day at least working to get Kalecgos down for the second time.. and what do you know? We go in filled with energy and kill him in ONE shot! :D The raid leaders were rather stunned, as was most of the raid. It was a pleasant turn of events after wiping on him SOO many time over the past few weeks... So.. Yesterday we went on to wipe the rest of the evening on Brutallus.

Regarding tanking in Sunwell... I have examined my gear and worked and reworked it many times trying to get the perfect combination of items. For Brutallus I had to have Full HIT cap of 141, remain Crit immune, AND I wanted to get over 30k armor. After playing around with some gems and combinations of trinkets and gloves, belt, chest pieces etc.. I finally achieved all three goals. My hitpoints suffered just a little, but once I upgraded all of my gems to epic AND I got the bracer that dropped off of Brutallus, I got my hit points to over 22k fully buffed.

My gear is listed in the armory. I currently have 5 pieces of T6. I keep passing on the chest because my Vindicator PVP chest seems better because of the resilience that can be used to help build up to the crit immunity. I have been pondering throwing on 2 T4 pieces for dps, but the T4 chest is just so inferior to the 2 main chests I have... Out of curiosity, I checked all of my gear for upgrades on WOW armory. I had nearly the best items in the game. My helmet is inferior to the engineering helmet, but I'm not an engineer. I still can upgrade my belt and boots to T6.. I'm not in any rush though. :D

The only question I have left to ponder... Should I replace my idol that gives me the agility bonus to dodge with the one that gives my party an increase to crit? Brutallus is essentially a DPS race... If my healers can keep me up without the agility proc'ing, then the crit bonus would be more beneficial...

Also, my Kalecgos gear is now my full tank gear with the neck traded out for the BT shadow resist neck, and my moroes lucky pocket watch traded out for the Arcane resist trinket from Karazhan. It helps enough with the shadow bolts and arcane blasts to help the healers keep me up.