Premature Burial

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’ve just stumbled across a website about the Anatomy of the Foot and Ankle. I use the word “stumbled” just about literally since I haven’t slept for one single second of this long night – not since I climbed into bed just after the 10 o’clock news. The foot and ankle anatomy lesson starts this way: “At some time in your life you should experience foot, heel, or ankle pain.” How’s THAT for a cheerful notion? You should experience foot heel or ankle pain.

Well if you should then I by God will. It’s my fate is how I feel right now, with the worst cold I have had since I stayed home sick from school for a solid week at age 15 and missed not just factoring in Algebra but also the whole darn unit on Silas Marner. My head feels like someone drilled a hole in it of the kind you might make to drain the milk out of a coconut. It feels as though it’s first had very drop of moisture sucked out of it as if by a Shop-Vac and concrete poured in. I feel completely walled up respiration-wise, buried, sealed in the tomb, like the poor guy in the Poe story Premature Burial.”

I have this cold presumably because someone sneezed on me. (click on any pic to enlarge):

I’m not sneezing like this woman; I’m just in gridlock. In fact I’d welcome a good sneeze which at least would show some movement . If I had snuff right now I’d take it to make me sneeze. What I did take was Afrin which whoops I just read TURNS OUT TO BE THE LAST THING YOU SHOULD TAKE because even if it’s just the third time in three days that I have used the stuff and they say that’s ok, I got the rebound effect. Chat rooms I have just now visited say “Hell, never take that stuff” “Throw it away!” one person wrote. “If you can’t go cold turkey, use it one nostril and the next night in the other.” Somebody wrote “Use Benadryl instead” and somebody else “Eat raw foods only.”

I might try this last since I can’t taste anything anyhow

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Anyway I finally crawled into bed again at 5:30, hoping for a few zzz’s AND MY HUSBAND WHOM I DESPISE BECAUSE HE CAN SLEEP opened one eye.

“I’m dying,” I croaked.

“Nobody ever died from lack of sleep,” said the brute.

“But I have chest pain too! And I think it’s radiating down my arm!”

“TT,” he said, patting my arm.. “Old TT!” That’s been his name for me since oh, 1972.

Sooooo, I lay there for another 90 minutes trying to breathe through the desert cave of my mouth.

Then, just at 7:15 the room suddenly bloomed with a flood of coral-tinged light that lifted me straight out of the bed.

Here is what I saw from our deck at the conclusion of my miserable night: a series of vistas that that filled me with such a sense of wonder and unreasonable joy that, speaking of feet and ankles, my best friend Self Pity couldn't even set a toe down.