and you'll know pretty much how I feel right now. My throat feels stabby and ravaged and my body feels ominously like it is being overrun by ravaging Viking hordes (sorry, my germs apparently just changed nationality and era) and I pretty much feel like shit. Here my metaphor runs out.
Blah. I started feeling sketchy yesterday at work. At first I thought my throat hurt just because of the dry air in the office. Remember, I just changed jobs, and this was my first day in the new office, and it was, indeed, hot in there, and my new boss took me on a tour of the vaults and storage rooms, where the temperatures varied wildly and dust and damp abounded. If anything there was that would piss off one's allergies and goad one's sinuses into a frothing rage, it would be my new workplace. Luckily, I'm not terribly allergic to dust. Just cats.
But no, my prickly throat and snotty nose didn't abate at lunchtime, when I went outside for a walk. Instead, it got worse, and the sneezing and constant nose-running started, and when I got back inside, I felt unnaturally warm, which I chalked up to having come into a warm building from outside, but no, I did not re-acclimate, and continued to feel as though my ribcage was shedding water as the afternoon wore on. Moreover, who replaced my bone-marrow with lead? Because I swear my arms and legs weighed about five times what they should, and my poor old head had obviously been replaced with a wrecking ball. My post-work ride home was lots-o-fun. I failed to wear my goggles in the morning because it wasn't too cold out, but come evening, it surely was. It was even snowing a tiny bit–sandy particles of ice blipped out of the sky intermittantly, and whenever one landed in an eye, I saw stars. The increased eye-watering increased the nose running, and I had to pull my ski mask down under my chin so that it would not get soaked in snot, and wiped my nose vigorously on the backs of my gloves every couple of blocks. Yes, the gloves went into the wash immediately after I got in.
This morning, I woke up, felt even shittier, and called in sick from work. I laid back down and fell asleep and slept like it was my paid job. Sometime around 9:30 a.m., Todd got home, and I came out into the living room, pulled on a pair of jeans, a pair of wool socks, two shirts and a sweatshirt, and made a pot of coffee. We talked a bit, then he had a shower. Then he came back to the living room, drank a cup of coffee, and went to bed. I rummaged the cupboard, discovered that Todd's last cold in February had demolished our medicine supply, and hied myself two blocks up the street to the Walgreens to buy *Special Medicine* that had to be gotten from behind the pharmicist's counter. *Special Medicine* contains pseudoephedrine, a decongestant which is the only thing that helps me to breathe when I have a bad head cold. Pseudoephedrine is also the stuff from which meth is made. Considering the gigantic pain in the ass that tweakers are, I was cool with having to ask for my *special medicine* from the pharmacy clerk and hand over my driver's license and be logged in a roster as a purchaser of a pseudoephedrine product. If I can breathe and meth-chefs have a harder time cooking up their own rocket-fuel, then I'm a fairly happy camper.
So, I bought my cold remedies and dragged my butt back home, whereupon I took a dose of Nyquil, went all woozy, and thunked myself into bed, where I slept a solid three hours.
I reckon that since I am now well enough to write up a significantly goofy essay about being sick, I'll probably be well enough to go to work tomorrow. My voice has gone all wonky. It's all Marge Simpson, all the time, but this is par for the course of one of my colds. The voice is the first thing to go, and will probably stay gone for the better part of a week. I'll be to the point where I feel just fine, but I sound like I won a helium-huffing contest. Good times, good times!