Monday, November 19, 2007

eclipsed

You remember the old comic-book villain Eclipso? Nasty fellow with one half of his face painted black, the other half white. That's how I felt when I woke up Wednesday morning.

The left hand of my head felt perfectly normal, but on the right side my eye was watering, my nose was running and my ear was hot and itchy. I've seldom had a head cold that was so compartmentalised.

For the next four days I felt miserable. I wandered around the house scavenging any medication that looked useful.
Paracetemol.
Vitamin C.
Antihistamines.
Ibuprofen.
The symptoms went away but they always came back.

I was plunged into despondency. I felt there was no way I could summon up enough energy to get through each day.

The worrying part was that I was halfway through the annual Novel Writing Month and had undertaken to write 1700 words a day -- every day. Up till then I'd been right on schedule, but now I went 36 hours without typing a word.

There may be things you can still do with a heavy head cold, but writing fiction doesn't seem to be one of them.

And as students of Murphy's Law would know, this happened on the least convenient day of the week. I had to get up early because my sister Julie was driving our older sister Pauline to the eye clinic for a cataract operation. And I had an appointment that afternoon with my endocrinologist.

My doctor wasn't terribly happy that I hadn't improved at all, but he did listen to my complaints about being in constant ill-health. He wrote a couple of extra squiggles on the form for my blood test and said to make an appointment with the Diabetes Association for a consultation. He is planning to change my medication so I need to be tutored about the warning signs of the hypo.

*Sigh* I could have done without all this, but that's the way it happens sometimes.

It could have been worse. By Saturday night I had just about shaken off the symptoms without picking up any new ones. I'd even managed to just about catch up with my NaNoWriMo writing project, though it wasn't easy.

My sister's cataract operation went off without a hitch. That was good.

It was just a shame that in the middle of my ill-health I had to go to the office on Thursday afternoon. I felt so dreadful that I had to exert all my willpower to just get through my work.

My boss discovered after about an hour that he had his jumper on backwards. He asked if I'd noticed it and I was at a loss for what to say. It was difficult to explain that if I had noticed it, it was so low down on my list of priorities that my mind (running on emergency power) never got round to processing the information.

Surely the rest of November must be better!

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