On the Mend?

Just getting to where I can climb our of the the bed and look around a little.Still feel pretty crummy though. (This winter cold is killing me!)BUT! they do say "Feed a cold, starve a fever" so….here's me without my wig searching in the fridge for a snack . :-)

Karma

I'm sick now too. First it was a tickle in my throat and then a rumble in my chest, like the sound from the engine room on the Queen Mary. This id what I get for making light of my man's illness.I went to bed the other night feeling as bleak as bleak can be, sleeping next to my dead Pope of a husband who had not uttered more than 12 words to me in 24 hours. (That extended whine is here.) But then, the next morning I woke to glory all around me: this sunlight in this room at January’s end. (David's reclining body in the foreground.)If only I had not, over the last few nights, curled up in the same small nest of bedding as a person who lay spouting like a whale – every cough and sneeze flying straight up into the air and settling in a fine mist all around me.By evening I had the headache too, and in spite of the 16 kinds of cold medications I took, it was excruciating. In the night I was sure that some evil force had got hold of the plastic-bag-like membrane in which the brain is suspended and was trying to pull the whole thing out through my ear.This is what I get for making Weekend at Bernie’s style jokes about poor David. It's my ‘goin’ around comin’ on around for sure.I had a flu shot back in October so whatever this is it’s presumably not the flu. David, however, did NOT have a flu shot and so presumably does have the flu.Anyway he’s still pretty miserable. I fetch him tea and toast, but he doesn't care about eating. Last night we tried to grab a meal out with our girl Annie but he couldn't even bring himself to have a drink. (what, no alcohol?!) He’s still got that thousand-yard stare, though and now it’s morning again too.And now we're home again our workday world with the Poop-Doggy-Dog-Walkers filing past outside our windows, sigh.I wish we had the view above that we had Sunday morning when we were up north. It sure did raise our spirits, sick or no. But the world these last few days is wrapped in fog and rain - and we're just here exchanging droplets. :-(

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

++++++++++++++

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.