Symtpom Progress and Roudup
It has come to my attention that, ironically, one of the really good things about being sick is that it's not (necessarily) too difficult to get a good night's sleep. Of course, this sleep is usually one that simply clonks you over the head and doesn't really leave you feeling rested, but at least it does mean you're out like a light for a good long time. Or at least, that's how you remember it most of the time. Granted, the actual sleep experience is broken up into some sleeping bits and many waking up to cough or display other symptoms of your ailment bits. But still, the subjective reality remains true.

Last night I got a pretty awful night's sleep. This, I am telling myself, is a good thing. It means that the various (minor) nuisances that kept me up are no longer being overpowered by the need for my body to rest. (Though I bet it still damn well wants to.) I fell asleep at about 11:30 PM last night, after speaking tearfully on the phone with Sara and watching the beginning of Lost In Translation (IMDb). I slept soundly until 4 AM. That's, like, four and a half good hours.

I don't remember what I was woken up by first. It might have been the cold sweat that soaked my sheets and made me move over on the mattress to Sara's usual position. Or it could have been the fact that my throat was parched. It was probably the really annoying *drip-drip* from the leak in our ceiling coming from the vertical radiator, though. I'm pretty sure whatever it was, I also needed to pee, which I went and did. Then I went back to bed.

I woke up again at least three or four more times from one such nuisance or another, even using the mindfold to keep things darker, but that only resulted in my forehead also sweating. I finally moved my covers and pillows and water and cell phone to the couch/bed-thing in the living room and settled in there after trying to remove as many nuisances as possible from that room (shut down computer because it was too loud, hung a shirt from the back of my computer chair and pressed it against the computer corner to minimize the light from the LED status lights, closed the door to living room because of that incessant *drip-drip*, etc.). Unfortunately, this didn't really help and only actually succeeded in giving my a terribly back cramp for sleeping in some awkward position, but at least it was a change of scenery.

I woke up for good at 9:30 AM (I think when Sara called me?), needing a drink and having painful rumblings in my stomach. Great, 'nother bout of diarrhea. At least that, too, is getting better. So at this point, I think it might be helpful to list all my symptoms and their percentages toward being gone:

• Cottonmouth - maybe 50%


• Aches and pains - maybe 60%


• Headache - maybe 80%


• Dizzyness - maybe 95%


• Chills - gone


• Night sweats - maybe 25%


• Runny nose - maybe 25%


• Hacking cough - maybe 75%


• General weakness - maybe 75%


• Stomach pains - maybe 80%


• Loss of appetite - maybe 30%


• Diarrhea - maybe 50%


• Fever - I have no idea, I don't know where our thermometer is and so I never took my temperature

Forgive me if I'm missing a symptom or two, but I think that's a pretty big picture view of how things are right now. I really, really, really want this to go away by Monday. I am so not looking forward to my first day back at work now because I know I'm going to be so swamped with so many things that I have no context for because I've been out. When you add that to the fact that I barely feel like I'm keeping my head above water anyway half the time, I'm sure to feel overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed makes me depressed and makes me shutdown and that's the last thing I need to have happen. But I'm not going to think about that until tomorrow, when I have to do the thing where I make a really accurate supposition about whether or not I should come in to work on Monday.

In the mean time, I'll have to somehow find something to, you know, do, that doesn't involve much of the rest of the physical world. I suppose this would be a great time to take out the trash and clean the stove and finally clean (gulp) under the kitchen sink (it's well past time for general housekeeping, I forced myself to clean the tub on Thursday evening, don't ask how), but I'm still not feeling in much of a condition to do much of that. Emily was amazingly generous yesterday and brought over a few things, and it's a very pleasant reminder that friends live in the neighborhood.

Still though. Any way you slice it, being sick fucking sucks.