T'aint no fun feeling low.
Somethin' or the other has grabbed my throat and scratched it up good. SO it's raw, hurts a bit, and produces a voice in a lower register. Reminds me of the old joke about a guy tellin' his girl that he loves her as he gently strokes that hollow spot in her neck. "Lower," she coos. So he tells her that he loves her in a deeper voice (rim shot).
In the fine tradition of folks who aren't sick very often (only once in the past year, and that because I am an idiot about eating things I should have either thrown away weeks ago OR added to the compost pile days ago), I am noting every little thing about my present malaise.
My head has that "filled with stuffin' " feeling (some friends, relatives, and ex-wives will be quick to add "And . . . ? " to that statement) that's not quite a headache and not quite painless. Aggrevatin' for sure.
I've spoken about the throat, but farther down there's somethin' a rumblin' around in my chest - and my alveo wouldn't lie : I am cone-jested up. SO I gulp down cough syrup / expectorant (doesn't taste as good as I recall when I was a youngin') and pop a few aspirin every six hours and am even takin' an anti-biotic (sounds like "Kee-Flex" - does that sound like a muscular antibiotic on steroids or what?).
I am forcing fluids (decaf Constant Comment tea with half-and-half is my favorite fluid after plain, cold water), and my kidneys don't cotton to that - so I'm scootin' to the restroom every so many minutes to relieve myself - but have half a mind to scamper out to the compost pile to add some of these medicated nutrients to the mix.
But in daylight hours, I won't risk becoming a guest of the county should a passerby see me giving a shot of nitrogen to the microbes at work out there. That will have to be an adventure under the cover of darkness.
My mouth is dry despite all the wet stuff sloshing around in there, so i suck on cough drops. I feel slightly sore all over, as if I had lifted beyond my normal range of weights during my exercise session in my gym (ha - at my gym they probably think I am either dead or in jail and wonder if I will ever return).
Not certain why my neck is particularly sore, but I would pay more than a reasonable price for someone to rub it for - oh - four straight hours or until I drift off, whichever comes last. What IS it about those neck and trapezius muscles, that they're always so sore ?
I have not lost my appetite, so some "Good Heavens" Blue Belle ice cream felt good going down mid-afternoon, and I ate a small breakfast and snack lunch. So this won't even qualify as a "weight-loss" flu or anything. Gotta get 15-30 pounds off somehow, and sometimes an illness is just the thing. But not this time.
Funny how we regard others when we are not up to snuff. We somehow assume they know of our plight and are ever-ready to assist us in servile ways. This is a serious misconception. If anything, others are irritated at our being slightly off our game and waste little time showing their displeasure.
Oh - such insidious behavior by others must be deftly displayed and dealt with - diplomacy is the coin of the realm in polite society - but a strain of some bug or the other that has you at its mercy creates a streak of self-centeredness surpassed only by politicians, very young children, and beautiful people, so diplomacy is out of the question.
In fact you feel more like ordering others around to do your bidding - and that attitude hardly goes down easily. More likely - others will find reasons simply not to be around you at all for as long as you are ill - and the sight of them rushing into other rooms ahead of your arrival gives you the feeling lepers must have suffered for millenia.
Of course the good side of this is that you will have more time to yourself - and that can be nice if you felt like doing anything other than wee-weeing and sleeping. Here's where I thank my lucky stars my mother instilled in me a love of reading - curling up with a good book is truly restorative, and often leads to - you guessed it - slumber.
But what a pleasure it can be building a cozy nest and surrounding yourself with all the accoutrements of ickiness: tissue paper, favorite beverage(s), candy, books, videos, tissue paper, drugs that would make a horse swoon, tissue paper, wet ones, favorite music, a computer, tissue paper, and the phone.
I guess I will be over this in a couple of days - drugs should work. But in the meantime, I have re-learned that feeling icky is not for sissies. I am sleepier, get tired sooner, so go to bed earlier and sleep longer (maybe that's one good effect) and generally am fed up with being me.
Can I be you for awhile ?
