Breathing is a luxury

One that I have taken for granted for far too long.  Now that this luxury has been taken away from me, I miss it... oh so much.

I am sick.  Sooo sick.  I have not been this sick in a long time.

Usually I feel like I am getting a cold, and that feeling lasts for a few days, and I might not be 100% myself, but it usually goes away and I find myself thinking, "Hmm.. I guess it wasn't a cold after all."  Sometimes it's just a runny nose, or perhaps a sore throat, but it usually doesn't manifest into anything more.  But not this time.  On Tuesday night I had that feeling - "I think I'm getting a cold..."  I went to bed, and I woke up and just knew - I had a cold.  A real one. It wasn't just a feeling this time.

It's been a long, long time since I've had a real cold.  I had the flu back in 2006 and then maybe one or two colds since then.  I have horrible allergies, so some people think that I always have a cold, but that is not the case.  When I have a real cold I am miserable.

Last night at dinner I announced, "I am not sure if I'm going to make dinner tonight.  I'm not even hungry, since I have a quart of snot and slime in my stomach that has been draining down my throat for the entire day."

Yum.

Needless to say, no one else really wanted to dinner after that either. (Just kidding... I did end up making ham and fries, which was not on the menu, but I needed comfort food and my messed up taste buds were craving seasoned curly fries.)  DH - who is by now used to my sometimes overly dramatic claims - appreciated the descriptive nature in which I described the amount of fluids that I can swallowed; he is able to clearly visual a quart and immediately understood that I must have swallowed a lot of snot.

Last night we went to bed really early.  As in, like 9 p.m. early.  In fact, DH was asleep before that.  I took two benadryl's with hopes that I could just drug myself to sleep.  I propped myself up with some extra pillows to help with the drainage and dozed off.  But I'm pretty sure I never fell into a true deep sleep.  I keep waking up gasping for air - as someone who usually sleeps with her mouth wide open, I can't believe that my body was keeping my mouth closed as my nose slowly clogged, causing me to essentially suffocate in my sleep.  My legs were twitching from the sinus medication that I took.  Other times, I would be breathing just fine and then all of sudden there would be a gurgling in my breathing and I would need to go to the bathroom to blow my nose.

I remember looking at the clock at 11:10, 12:11, 1:13, 2:59, 3:34, 4:46, 5:15.... and that's just what I recall right now.  I feel like I was awake all night, probably because I was.

For every one ounce of fluids that I am taking it, I am blowing at least two out of my nose.  I would not be surprised if I go through an entire box of tissues today.  I guess I should be grateful that it's coming out instead of staying in my head.  Being stuffed up is worse - in my mind, at least - than having a constantly running nose. 

I am not a very good sick person.  I'm in a daze from the medication that I took to try to keep my nasal passages clear and my nose hurts.  I need to take 3 ibuprofen's every 3 hours in order to keep my throat from being too painful to swallow.  When I'm sick I never want to cook dinner, and right now I am responsible for preparing meals for 3 other people, who may be very angry with me if I decide to go on a cooking strike.

I hope this passes quickly.  I don't think that it's going to be necessary to visit a doctor, as long as the symptoms don't get any worse.  But in the meantime, I'm going to continue to sit here in my haze and try to remember the days of the past when breathing was something that came without effort.  Those were the days....