Thought I was mostly over being sick. Turns out I was just misinformed. Now though rather than primarily being exhausted/drained, I’m primarily stuffed up/unable to breathe through my nose, and coughing like mad.
I’m getting tired of it. Too bad I can’t think of anything I can do (the medicine doesn’t really seem to do much to help, but I still take it).
The natural world, I mean, I always hate the regular one. But right now it’s wet and cold and miserable, and I can’t seem to care about anything.
I know ours is uncomfortably hot, but I’m ready for summer. That will mean both that I can go places without feeling miserable and that there will be places to go which aren’t miserable.
Don’t believe the packaging, I’ve been enjoying these for a couple days, and I have no lover…wait. The flu and I have gotten to know each other quite well over the last few days…even become intimate…shared the same bed…oh no! They ARE made only for people who have lovers! WAIT! If you don’t have a lover, and were about to go buy these, don’t! You could be in mortal peril!
Disclaimer: for those of you who are computer people and not literature people, if you consult a literature person, he or she can inform you that this was supposed to be funny. He or she will likely be unable to tell you whether anyone actually thought it was [funny], but most literature people do in fact possess the necessary skills to detect the intended satire of “people-who-don’t-know-how-to-use-apostrophes-to-demonstrate-the-possessive-in-English.”
Well, probably not.
This afternoon I went to the doctor. Turns out I have H1N1 (swine flu, guess I ated too much pig), Bronchitis, and Strep. Nothin’ like some good old-fashioned multiple simultaneous viral and bacterial infections. So apparently I can’t go back to work until Monday.
Anyhow, last night at around 11:30 I woke up and, thinking to sleep through the rest of the night, went into my bedroom and got another dose of Nyquil, since it’d been long enough since my last dose of acetaminophen. Went back to bed. Tried to fall back asleep, laying on my left side, with my arms out in front of me. Felt uncomfortable, fidgeted my way mostly onto my stomach, with my head facing to the right and my arms crossed under the pillow. That didn’t feel right either. Turned to face left (still with my stomach mostly flat), shifted arms to be slightly the other way but still crossed beneath my pillow. Lay there a while, shifting back and forth. Could not get comfortable. Maybe dozed a tiny bit. Went back to shifting. Was hot, would push down the comforter, and thirty seconds later be freezing and pull it back up. Never comfortable the whole time. Eventually I began to see that I was just trying to find the right combination and saw a weird pattern/schematic thing, with white stick figure lines wearing white balloon gloves and yellow booties on my bed in a number of various patterns, combinations, and poses, which mentally corresponded to my attempted body positions, and felt like one of them must be the one that was optimal for comfort and would let me fall asleep. But I couldn’t (fall asleep; I was awake this whole time).
Then I kept shifting and shifting, and eventually it was like there were voices/compulsions in my head which kept screaming at me to shift. There was like a need to lie on my left side with my arms out in front of me to hold a cube of scrap metal (like a 2 ft. x 2ft. x 2ft. Borg cube, but made of scrap metal rather than weird advanced glowy stuff), or to be flat on my stomach with this vision of a gray metal helmet with a tremendous underbite, and my head felt like it was full of howler monkeys, and at my hairline on my forehead and all around my head at that height it felt like there was a tremendous vice squeezing in.
For a while I tossed and turned, unable to do anything about all of this, and completely unable to get any closer to the unconscious realm.
Eventually, I thought that maybe if I could get my thought process back under control and start thinking about yachts or exotic cars or something, and get my mind back to a single train of thought, I’d be able to calm down and go to sleep, so I tried to reign all of these howler-monkey-thoughts in. For a while I wasn’t able to do anything, but eventually I kind of mastered them in that I got them all organized. So then for a while it’s like they were all working and all taxing my brain, and it still felt like I had a vice on, but at least they were somewhat under control. Then it seemed like my entire body was a platform, and that each of these thoughts were in control of part of it, but I at least had them organized and confined to and only in charge of that part, and that they were all working together on an overall factory-esque project. I don’t know why I felt like a factory or like I was producing something, but I didn’t, and I just kept thinking that it must really be draining me and was probably reversing all the good done by getting sleep the day before by tiring me out and using up all my resources.
Eventually (around 6; this all probably started around 12-1, shortly after taking the Nyquil and being unable to fall asleep) I was able to get back to a single train of thought, and then just had a migraine, but no longer felt like my head was in a vice or contained howler monkeys or anything. The entire period of the episode, and afterwards, I was (and am) convinced that it was the side effect of taking Nyquil and being unable to fall asleep. Courtney assures me that the migraine part of it was unrelated (maybe a part of my ongoing fever?) and that the acetaminophen simply wouldn’t have been strong enough to deal with it. So that’s what my last night was like. Oh yeah, around 6-ish I started being able to doze. Around 7 I took some mucinex, and around 8 I took some acetaminophen (aka off-brand tylenol, JUST dedicated acetaminophen unlike Nyquil which uses it in conjunction with other stuff). Then I was able to sleep throughout most of the day again.
At this point, the only thing that’s really a consolation is the knowledge that if this were five hundred years ago, this would be fatal, and I’m gonna be perfectly healthy in a couple weeks. Hahah, suckers.
