Cav's Place

I mentioned nursing a sore throat, didn’t I? Well, no more than a couple of hours after I posted that, the sore throat became only a minor concern, as the other symptoms started making themselves felt, adding up to probably the worst cold or flu I had ever since I was little. Back then, I usually had a few bad ones each year, but in recent years I found myself almost completely free of anything of the kind. I may have to deal with occasional coughing for even months at a time, the odd sore throat and of course a simple runny nose, but the last time I had anything that could be in any way comparable was right after Andra left, and not even that was quite like this.
It may have started with nothing more than a sore throat, but a very stuffy nose soon followed, then all that crap started sliding down my throat and settling in various places, leading to coughing. Plus, of course, quite a bit of fever, being dizzy, feeling like all flesh wanted to peel itself off me, headaches, short but very sharp jabs in my ears, my throat switching from being sore to actually hurting and at times feeling very cold no matter how many warm clothes I had on me or what the temperature was inside the room. Typical symptoms, but taken to such a level that I couldn’t even sleep at first, as I’d wake up suffocating and coughing within minutes, no matter what positions I tried. Not even trying to sleep sitting up did any good.

But, as the saying goes, a cold gets cured in a week if untreated and seven days if treated, so I was counting the days and waiting to see improvements after the fourth, while just drinking some warm tea made from what I could find around here that I thought would help, with honey and lemon, and eating a fair amount of citrus fruits, including about half a lemon at some point and another piece later. I also did my best to get as much of the crap out as I could, by blowing my nose in the sink even a few times per hour, so I won’t rub it raw by wiping it with something. Not that I was getting anywhere, as everything seemed to “regenerate” almost instantly and I was usually stopping when I just couldn’t keep blowing anymore, but it had to make it at least slightly easier later, when I knew I’ll have to spit out everything that got deposited in my chest.
See, I absolutely sucked at expectorating when I was little, hardly ever managing to get anything at all out, which resulted in some complications and treatments that could drag on for months… And then I didn’t really need to do it anymore for probably more than ten years now, so I knew that anything I’ll manage to keep from getting there in the first place will be a huge help later. My attempts to also try to spit out a little from the beginning were probably more effort than they were worth, but I was rewarded with a few very tiny pieces every now and then too.

It wasn’t exactly easy to last through it, after barely catching an hour of sleep Saturday night, another hour Sunday morning and two more, separately, Monday morning. But then I also managed to get some little bits of sleep lasting anything between 15 minutes and one hour later that day, as I curled in bed whenever my nose seemed slightly less stuffy for a moment and slept until I’d wake up suffocating and in a fit of coughing. And since I had also noticed that the symptoms didn’t exactly get worse during that day but my ability to manage some of them got better, I was quite sure I was past the worst of it. It was day four, after all.
And that’s exactly how it was, as yesterday’s improvements were really noticeable, and I could also start spitting out some of that crap. Not much, and the amount of effort needed to get any of it out was so high that the muscles used for coughing quickly ended up next to unusable, to the point that after such an attempt it was even difficult to use them to try to breathe properly anymore. But I just kept up what I was doing, also aided by being able to sleep for a total of seven or eight more hours over the course of the day, including just about two hours without interruption yesterday morning. The fact that Monday evening I took a bath probably helped as well. By myself, so not counting the baths taken with Andra, I had taken only showers pretty much ever since I met her, but a shower seemed like a rather bad idea at that point, so I went for the bath and will take another one this evening as well.

And then we get to today, when I’m really feeling that I’m breaking free of it, probably also thanks to a couple of better teas that dad bought. (Speaking of which, I seem to have “passed it on” to my parents already and it probably started too late to get cured by New Year’s, so that’ll probably result in a rather rough time then, unfortunately.) Nose’s still very runny, perhaps even more so than yesterday, but I could sleep pretty well this time, even for four hours straight, and really started to be able to spit stuff out. It’s surprisingly easy too, though there are still moments when the accumulated effort gets to be too much and I have to try to persuade my body to give itself a bit of a break, because it tries to break and spit so much that I can end up in a coughing fit when I’m hardly even able to cough anymore, much less spit anything out. But I got a good part of it out already and seem to have reached something of an agreement with my body regarding how and when further attempts should be made.
The other symptoms are also much better and my throat seems to want to get back to being roughly as sore as it was during the first two days instead of hurting. Then again, that may simply be a result of all the coughing and spitting. I’m at least thankful that I’m not spitting out blood, as that’d be worrying, though hardly surprising at this point. I blew quite a lot of it out my nose, particularly this morning, when there was a point when there was more blood than anything else in what was coming out, so I even stained my sleeves a little. But that seems to have gotten much better since as well. It’s day six, after all.

Either way, all’s well that ends well, which I hope I can already say about this at this point. Seeing as I wandered around the city about as much while searching for the cat and the box as I would have in around half a year otherwise, and that I also went through a lot of crowded places, with plenty of people coughing and sneezing around me, it was perfectly obvious that I’ll end up here. I’m just thankful that the first symptoms appeared the day after it was all done, so I lasted long enough to get what I wanted and send it. It may be all for nothing, certainly looks like it right now, but at least I did what I felt I had to…

Unrelated, but let me add this here too: Sunday, I cried again. That’s three times in less than five months, after three years without managing it at all before that. The trigger was looking up “If We Hold on Together” after happening to stumble upon The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists on TV and finding myself carried probably some 20 years into the past, when I first saw the first one… Probably wondered what if I’d have known back then that my life was really going to continue being just as crappy, with the exception of those three years…