This Thing I Learned at Age 31

So I’ve been sick for…a while.

Since the middle of May, in fact.

May was kind of a blur for me because I had a stress breakdown after the fundraiser for Julie, I couldn’t afford food, I had the therapy dog test coming up, Sophie had her six month checkup, and then Jilly-bean rapidly became ill and went down hill and died the beginning of June. It seems I might’ve had a virus or something and I probably didn’t notice because I was already weak and tired and constantly dizzy by the sudden drop in daily calories while I was rationing food. But one thing stuck.

The Cough of Doom.

The cough that lasted all day. And all night so I was getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night. The cough that got progressively worse. The cough that had me choking in fits so hard that I threw up. Frequently. (TMI? Fuck you, it’s my blog.)

The last month and a half, people IRL have been giving me odd looks, because apparently I resemble death. I’m pale, I’m haggard and sickly. Not sleeping will do that to a girl. “Go to the doctor,” was the common refrain.

“But I don’t want to waste anyone’s time–I’m not sick. I don’t have a fever, I don’t have chest pain, I’m not wheezing. I just have a cough.”

“…that won’t go away. Go to the doctor.”

Dr. Dina finally threatened me, and she’s scary, so I went to see a nurse practitioner. And she confirmed I don’t have the plague but probably cough-variant asthma, and sent me home with an inhaler and instructions to come back in two weeks.

Twenty-four hours later, I’m better. I’m not coughing constantly. I slept–SLEPT!–seven hours straight. And as a result of sleeping, I could do things today like think and move and function and manage my moods and clean.  Sleep is the foundation on which everything else is built; without it, my day loses structure, and without that self-imposed structure, I become chaos incarnate in a filthy house staring at a blinking cursor on my screen unable to remember basic things like nouns and verbs with no energy to even feed myself and unable to battle crazy mood swings.

And the magical inhaler fixed it.

So this is the lesson I’ve learned: apparently when you’re sick you can go the doctor and then they give you medicine and you get better. And sometimes you don’t even have to argue with anyone or roll your eyes at them for being stupid.

I am in awe of this concept.

I’m eyeing this “go to the doctor” idea warily still; the experiment might need to be repeated to be 100% sure (but hopefully not for a while).

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to being a functioning human being again. There is work, several meetings and a funeral next week, and also much to be done if I’m releasing a book next month.

(Speaking of, I saw an August 1 release date being posted around for River–uh, guys, LATE August. I’ve said that everywhere: LATE. VERY LATE. Aug 25th at the very earliest.)