I am so sick of being sick. I feel like if I don’t stop coughing soon my sides will cramp up so hard I’ll never be able to relax my muscles again and I’ll walk around bent over like an ambulatory question mark for the rest of my life.
Tag: sick as a dog
home alone
And once again I’m home doing my best to recover from an attack of the coughing crud. I’m not sure if I’ve had a relapse of the old coughing crud I thought I’d gotten over, or this is a different strain of coughing crud that I was fortunate enough to collect right after the first run of crud. So far, I’ve got the complete set! Yay me!
I’ve been coughing and crudding since Monday night, forcing myself to go back to work and tough it out every day because I was working on a huge project that I finished yesterday. Then this morning when my alarm went off I hit snooze for the first time in years, and when I finally did roll out of bed and shamble towards the bathroom, I got about halfway there before I thought to myself, screw it, there’s no way I’m going to work today.
So I called in, fed the cats, and made a pot of coffee, in that order, then settled in for a long day of hacking and coughing and blowing my nose a lot. Managed to do just a little light housework, too, so I could justify staying home all day, because I’ve been a guilt-ridden neurotic since the day I was born so I feel I have to justify taking a day off even when the microbial world is conspiring to murder me.
plague update
We still have the plague here. B thought it skipped her but she started feeling sick maybe three or four days ago and yesterday her boss sent her home from work. She’s got the same symptoms I had, stuffy head and hacking up gobbets of gross gunk.
I keep saying I’m on the upswing now and mostly that seems to be true, but I still have episodes when I can feel a pocket of something deep in the back of my head give way and the next few sloppy minutes will be me continually blowing hard through my nose into yards and yards of toilet paper, sooo gross.
gasp
I am so sick of breathing through my mouth.
And coughing. I could do without coughing for a while.
gasp cough snort
So now it’s day seven of the monster death head cold. I thought I was on the upswing but now I’m not so sure. I spent about half the night breathing through my mouth which means I spent half the night not sleeping because I can’t sleep when I have to breathe through my mouth, pretty much a replay of the night before. Thank goodness for coffee. I’ll be drinking gallons of that stuff all day.
Synonym for stuffed
And today is day four of the death monster head cold from beyond the stars, which means I’ve reached the point in my illness when I’m so frustrated about having to breathe through my mouth all the time that I fantasize about going down to the work bench looking for power tools to relieve the congestion. Or even a toilet plunger. I imagine it would be so easy to suck all the gunk out of my nose it almost makes me cry. If I thought I could get one to fit tightly over my face, I wouldn’t even stop to rinse it off.
I woke up in the middle of the night to visit the bathroom and while I was there, the thick curtain of mucus blocking my sinuses parted just long enough for me to grab a couple quick breaths through my nose. Seizing the moment, I snatched a yard or two of toilet paper from the roller and blew with all my might, relieving my nasal passages of gallons of the stickiest goo ever conceived of. There was so much goo I had to grab another handful of toilet paper and blow, and when that didn’t get the job done I grabbed more, wondering how much there could possibly be.
Turned out my nose was bleeding, which happens to me commonly in the dry weather of winter, and especially when I’m sick, so I tipped my head back and pinched my nostrils together until the bleeding stopped. On the way out the thought struck me I should turn on the lights to see if I needed to clean up at all and HOLY CRAP IT LOOKED LIKE I’D BEEN SLAUGHTERING PIGS IN THERE! Spent five minutes with a damp cloth mopping up the blood I sprayed on the tub, tiles, wall and rug.
In spite of not being able to breathe all that easily, I managed to sleep until about six-thirty this morning, almost eight hours, before I gave up and started a pot boiling for coffee. A little java in the morning clears the clotted grunge from my throat like a shot of Drano, so I choke down half a cup even though it makes my head pound. After coffee, it’s green tea all day long. It seems to soothe my throat or at least I imagine it does. The steam rising from the cup feels good, too.
stuffed
It’s about quarter to nine on Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, and my sinuses are still stuffed full of whatever nasty goop sinuses fill up with when they’re infected by whatever nasty bug I got infected by. I got a pretty solid six, maybe seven hours of sleep last night before I couldn’t breath through my nose any longer; I can’t sleep when I’m forced to breath through my mouth, so I passed a half-hour or so rolling from one side to the other, loosening up the gunk that was plugging my head. When it was finally ready to harvest, I rolled out of bed, toddled off to the bathroom, yanked a couple yards of toilet paper off the roll and blew and blew and blew and blew and blew and I still didn’t get all the gunk out. It’s going to be an all-day project.
over the river
It’s about twelve-thirty as I type these words and I should be about halfway to Arkansas right now. My Darling B and I had plans to travel to my mom’s house, where we would stay for three nights over the holiday weekend. For a while earlier this week it looked as though the weather might derail our plans but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, I fell victim to a virus that’s been going around. It started with a scratchy throat on Tuesday, blew up into congestion that filled my sinuses from top to bottom with goo more powerfully sticky than anything Gorilla Glue makes, and which left me weak and sleepy and worn-out as a bald tire. I got a solid eight hours of sleep last night with the help of a shot of Nyquil before bed, so I almost feel as though I’m starting to come back from the worst of the congested sinuses and cruddy throat. If I can get a nap and another solid night’s sleep, I just might come back from this by Saturday or Sunday, and that would be a very good thing. Nothing worse than staring into a computer screen all day Monday with a head cold pounding away at my skull.
unicorns & daisies
I don’t know whether or not it’s been clinically proven that a hot, steamy shower helps open up sinuses and drain all the gooey awfulness out of them, but it sure feels like it does, and that’s what I needed most this morning. Or what I would settle for, anyway. What I needed most was to wake up feeling one hundred percent well, but since that didn’t happen I fell back on Plan B, Steamy Shower & Nap.
As good as the steamy shower made me feel, the nap made me feel even better. I napped the morning away in the recliner, pushing myself back just far enough that I could doze off without doing that head-jerk thing that happens when you fall asleep sitting up. My head stayed nicely in place but I was still sitting up just enough that all the gooey stuff kept on draining out of my head and all I had to do to help it along was wake up enough every fifteen minutes or so to take a sip from a glass of water and swallow. Probably more than you wanted to know, right? Well, you’re reading the blog of a sick person. What did you expect, unicorns and daisies?
puffy head, itchy eyes, swollen nose – WIN!
I woke up very early this morning because my head is as stuffed as a teddy bear’s. If I have to get sick, the timing couldn’t be more perfect: I have an entire week off from work, starting Monday.
With any luck at all, this is only an allergic reaction to the dust in the air at the office where I work, and I’m not coming down with a cold or the flu at all. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. I’m not going to be knocked flat on my back by throbbing, infected sinuses, breathing through my mouth for the next week or so. I’ve just got a stuffy head because of some dust. I’m going to keep thinking that.
It’s not entirely wishful thinking. I have all the signs of an allergic reaction: My throat is scratchy as sandpaper, my eyes are puffy and itchy as hell and have been for days, and I have no fever yet. Coincidentally, there’s been a lot of heavy moving going on at the office for the past week and a half. They’ve been building cubicles, dragging furniture across the carpeting, and opening up the ceiling tiles to pull cables to the new desks that have been set up. There’s got to be a ton of dust and who knows what else stirring around in the air, right? All I have to do is take it easy for a day or two and, after I use up a Kleenex box or two by blowing the entire contents of my head out through my nose, I should be all right, right?
Right.
This Is Drivel 