If things have been morgue-quiet this week it’s because following our awesome Halloween, I’m pretty sure I sent my white blood cells into panic mode after inhaling a whole bunch of particulate matter while sweeping up the results of last week’s high winds and doing some emergency trimming of dead fronds and flowers of a particularly giant giant bird of paradise in a bid to reduce the precariousness of its southward lean over the north fence from our neighbors’ yard.
By Sunday evening, my various airways were well-angry and I was sporting a fever and by Monday morning I had a bit of a dry cough that I took with me to the dentist where he had to employ copious amounts of anesthetics in order to numb the entire right side of my head so that he could work his special grinding brand of magic on one of my not so pearly whites.
Then I got on my bike and rode to work, wherein the anesthetics eventually wore off and I was popping ibuprofen like m&ms and I didn’t get out of there until near 8 p.m. for the bike ride home in rather cool and moist weather conditions, which actually proved somewhat soothing to my various air intakes and gave me some albeit false hope that maybe the symptoms were abating.
By Tuesday morning my jaw ached from the dental work, and I was generally walloped and thus notified my immediate superiors that me and my symptoms were staying home. Fever. Cough. Sneezing. Squeezed sinuses. Aches. Dizziness. All the usual headcold suspects to which I’m accustomed. Plus the right side of my tongue was really pissed off because while under the long-lingering local numbstuff I’d apparently bitten into it quite a few times unawares.
But thankfully the bug or whatever had invaded my airways hadn’t really worked its way deep into my lungs. Then came Tuesday night and after dinner perhaps with my immune system already being so taxed and on high alert, came a nicely severe and prolonged onset of Eosinophilic Esophagitis (EE), which you might recall I finally was able to self-diagnose last April after years of dealing with its mysterious occasional constrictions.
Just what I needed.
My general thrashing and coughing throughout the night drove Susan to seek refuge in the guest bedroom, and by Wednesday morning I felt even more beat up and took another sick day, spent combating my feverish chills by cranking our central heating to the max while actually attempting to get some work done and delusionally hoping the Cold Fairy would deliver a humidifier unto me along with a fifth of Nyquil and some nasal spray,. But alas I had to accept that the Cold Fairy was an imaginary figment and instead spent several semi-catatonic hours working up the energy and motivation to drive myself to the local Rite-AID and get such things.
With Susan deciding ahead of time to take the guestroom again last night, I chased ibuprofen with shots of Nyquil and crashed around 8 p.m. under the soothing steamy vapors of the humidifier, thankful that dinner had not brought about an EE encore. But last night proved the worst for the coughing and I was regularly being awakened by it.
This morning though? Ahhh. Things are better. The cough is still there, as is the fever, but both to lesser degrees. Still, I opted not to get suckered in by the first signs of relief and have taken another sick day.
Follow