electric mist

sludge

There is this moment when you start to appreciate the simple things in life. Like breathing. Breathing is pretty cool, and kinda necessary, and you know, we just don't appreciate breathing enough. There should be Oscars for good breathing, best breathing in a flu-like situation, deep breathing when angry, and so on. Because beathing? Kinda nice.

I really missed it this last couple of weeks.

I had the sludge. I don't know if it was officially the flu or just a really bad cold gone over-achiever or what, but I had the sludge. It moved into my lungs last weekend and I couldn't talk until last Monday or so, and I thought I had gotten over it, I was getting all better, see, and then Sludge said, "Oh, hell if you think so, Bitch, we're just getting started," and it proceeded to kick my ass all over the map. By Tuesday, breathing was really a lot of hard work as the goopy stuff wheezed in and out of my lungs and by Wednesday, I was pretty much prone on the sofa, moaning to anyone who'd listen, and by Thursday, I had a high fever and I sort of wanted to die, because I also had that horrible cough -- you know the one -- the one where your body cavities turn themselves inside out with every lung-rattling barking rhythm. Yeah, I was fun to be around, let me tell you.

Wednesay and Thursay nights, my husband ended up building a tent over me and turning the vaporizer on so I could breathe. He used a big golf umbrella (no idea where the hell that thing came from at two a.m.) and then draped sheets over it and had me sitting up against a pile of pillows, with more under my knees. Only the coughing? Made me have to go pee on a regular basis, so I'd climb out of the precariously balanced "tent" and then had to try to climb back in (because it took so long to set the damned thing up, but it really did help) and then of course, the umbrella closed on me and the sheets all fell and I leaned over trying to open the umbrella back up and get the sheet to drape just right over the chair that held the vaporizer so the steam could go inside the tent instead of outside (which was the whole point of the tent) and then I leaned too far and fell off the bed, knocking over the glass of water my husband had lovingly placed beside the bed and knocking over the vaporizer and crunching the umbrelling and bruising myself on the chair and it would have been fucking hysterical if I wasn't stuck on the floor upside down in a golf umbrella, my legs waving in the air and STILL NOT ABLE TO BREATHE. I'm not sure if I saw a camera flash just then or not, but if my husband ever needed to blackmail me, that was the photo to do it.

By Friday, I called my doctor and begged for mercy, and she prescribed the antibiotics I needed without making me go in to see her, and I think it was maybe the, "Please don't make me get dressed and come in, I'd rather kill myself at this point," that did it. I highly recommend that for a doctor-avoiding strategy, by the way. I spent all of Friday and Saturday extremely busy... I had to move from the bed to the sofa and then back to the bed again, and I'm here to tell you, that was a helluva lot of work. But today? I woke up feeling about a thousand percent better. So much so, I repainted my office and ended up cleaning and doing some other things that had been ignored for too long. But mostly, I just took these really long, deep breaths. I highly recommend them. Because you just never know -- that could be you stuck upside down in the umbrella next.

Posted by toni at March 6, 2006 12:28 AM