Friday, January 27, 2012

Being sick

     To start off with an understatement, I don't take well to being sick. I'm the kind of person who tends to go from perfectly healthy to falling over ill, and I've never been one to take a lot of medication, so my reaction to any kind of drug is to become loopy and out of sorts. In the past, I've tried to just tough it out, but these days, I'm done fighting those fights. I'll save my energy for something that really needs it.

     This past Sunday saw me being sniffly and generally blah. I put it down to the nasty weather of the first week of school, took some sudafed, and went to bed. By Monday morning, I looked sufficiently horrible that I got sent home from work before I could spread whatever I had to everyone else. More sudafed, tea, hot bath, tried to go to bed early. I ended up staring at the wall all night, as the sinus infection started crawling down into my lungs and making my life miserable. I got up long enough to write letters to my professors asking to be excused from class, and tried for another couple hours to fall asleep, to no avail.

     By Tuesday, I was running a fever in addition to sinus pressure and coughing up pretty colors, and decided it was time to call in the heavy hitters. The doctor's office had an appointment Wednesday afternoon, so after another sleepless night, I finally crawled into the one place I was hoping would have a remedy. After much examination, the doctor pronounced me sick with bronchitis, and asked:


     Now, let's see. I hadn't slept in two days, I had a quiz in Russian on Thursday that I couldn't focus enough to study for, I desperately needed to get back to school (the classes I'm in allow 2 absences, then your grades suffer), and he honestly wanted an answer to that question? Fortunately, I still had enough presence of mind to answer as politely as possible that the 5-day regime would be fine, thank you, and crawled out of there before anger replaced disbelief and I did something I'd regret.

     Fortunately, the pharmacy I use is very good with getting prescriptions filled quickly, and by the time I got there, they had it ready. I got some real food as well, because along with my temperature, the illness was playing red light, green light with my appetite too, and if I got seriously hungry again, I wanted to be able to feed myself well and fast.


     I took the first day's worth of pills with some food that evening, and about 40 minutes later, was already feeling better. I don't know what is in the medication I'm on, but it felt like most of the congestion wanted to flee my body like rats from a sinking ship, and I was more than happy to let it go. I got 2-3 hours of sleep that night (hey, it's 200% better than before, no complaints), and woke up feeling like I could actually focus. Unfortunately, that meant I could focus on the fact that I had 3 pages of homework and a short essay in Russian to complete by 2pm, but I pulled through and got everything done.

     Not wanting to push it, I decided not to go to dance class, so here I am at home, writing up a recap of my horrible week and hoping that maybe, maybe, I'll be able to sleep like a normal person tonight. Here's hoping. 

No comments:

Post a Comment