I've been mostly useless for...weeks now, I think it is.
I caught a cold right before Christmas and spent the whole time from Christmas Eve 'til nearly New Year's Eve feeling like death. At its worst--which, I think, was the day after Christmas--I wasn't able to sit up for longer than about an hour at a time...and nearly passed out more than once because if you're going to be ill, why do it in half-measures? (*Sigh*)
As an aside, this is why I hate hearing people complain about their "weak immune systems" and how very sick this always makes them. The cold virus doesn't actually cause any tissue damage, so any symptoms you have are just immuno-responses. And as I'm multiple autoimmune disorders on legs, my symptoms--of anything, not just colds--are disproportionately bad in comparison to whatever bug I've got. So while the people who whine about their "weak immune systems" sneeze and sniffle a little and manage to go on about their daily lives, I'm laid up in bed like I'm dying. (And, yes, it was definitely just a cold or something mild like that, not the flu. The flu hits me even harder than that. Ugh. I don't even want to think about it.) So kindly don't ever mention your delicate constitution around me unless you want me to shove my foot right up your poor, delicate little ass.
*Eyeroll*
Oh, well, it was still a better Christmas, illness-wise, than last year. Last year, my daddy and I had to take my mother to the emergency room in the middle of the night the day after Christmas because she'd gotten some godawful stomach virus from my aunt and was so sick that she was getting worryingly delirious. (Somehow, miracle of miracles, I managed to not get that particular illness, for which I will be eternally grateful.)
Even now, though, post-cold, I'm still coughing and have that weird warped-sounding voice you get after you've been sick, along with a still slightly-stuffy head. It's not enough to really impair me, just enough to annoy me and make me feel like I'll never get enough to drink.
Still, though, even as the great respiratory virus of 2014 moves on (thank God), I'm left with a sort of bone-deep exhaustion that's not readily explained away. Well, not readily explained away if you're not batshit crazy, I should say. It's the kind of tired that can only come from my illness. The first symptom is the feeling of moving through molasses (and the second is apparently the use of needlessly poetic language of the "terrible" variety).
In addition to feeling like I'm trying to move with cement blocks chained to my limbs (and talking like I've stepped right out of some third-rate Shakespearean rip-off), I've got that "looking (and thinking) through a haze of cotton candy and Quaaludes" feeling, too. Oh, and I'm losing time, too. I have no idea how it got to be 11:10 at night.
All in all, I've been pretty unproductive. What I really want to do is sleep for about a hundred years, but I also know that won't help. (But, lord, is it tempting.) What I really *need* to be doing is sleeping considerably less because that would probably make it better. But curling up in bed has pretty much always been a favored activity for me when things get too loud in my head to deal with, and sleep, when it'll come, has always been a refuge that I'm loath to give up.
See? Bad Shakespearean rip-off. I can't even do iambic pentameter.
I'm going to have to do it, though, or the world will be at risk for once again being subjected to my crimes against the English language.
Nonetheless, I'm going to bed. Maybe falling asleep early (for me) will lead to getting up early (for me). Or something.
