I woke up this morning with my eyes glued shut. That was pretty disorienting. I wasn’t a character in a Dean Koontz novel, but I was relieved when I realized that I had conjunctivitis, as I’m not sure what I would have done if my eyes were sewn shut with fishing line.
After I sorted myself out, I remembered that I was supposed to be running the Knoxville Marathon today. I would have been just finishing up when I woke up, so I had a wave a sadness come over me. I took a long shower, letting the hot water run down my face, with a fantasy that it would wash away all the goo (both current and future) in my eyes.
It’s late in the afternoon in Boulder and I’ve taken two naps today. Neither were pretty – they were both sweaty, emotional, dream-filled messes with plenty of eye goo involved. I’m loaded up on Tylenol, but the pounding in my sinuses is unrelenting. I’m not able to take decongestants/antihistamines anymore, as they wreak unpleasant havoc on a part of me completely unrelated to what they are supposed to help with.
This cold came on hard on Tuesday. I haven’t been sick all winter and have felt good since November after a summer of physical misery that ended with a 60-day course of Cipro, ensuring that an enormous amount of bacteria in me – both the good kind and the bad kind – was very dead.
I know that I’m a whiny sick person. I also know that being sick tilts me toward depression. I’m lucky that Amy knows this also and takes amazing care of me when I’m sick.
I’ve felt a crash coming since Friday. I’ve been grinding through the work that I have, some of which has deadlines before I go on vacation in a week. I know I can tell the deadline enforcers that I’m sick and things will have to wait a few weeks, but then I’ll just have a bigger pile of backed up stuff to do, which just feels like an awful additional burden. And yes, I realize I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post, but I am also waiting for the full function version of Adobe Acrobat to download since I need to use it to edit the Adobe files I’m sending back to Wiley soon.
I know that every human being gets sick on a periodic basis. I also know that this particular cold (which I call Nev – Nasty Evil Virus), which has morphed into a cold + bacterial infection, is minor compared to what most people encounter on their time on this planet. I also know that my resources make it even easier for me to deal with something like this.
When I reflect on this, I still feel shitty, but I have context for how I feel. We all have periodic crashes of different levels of severity (and one that has ultimate finality), but that doesn’t make it any easier to work through the moment.
And yes, I’m looking very forward to my vacation.