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.

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.

I am so sick of breathing through my mouth.

And coughing. I could do without coughing for a while.

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.

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.

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?