I was sick last week. I thought a couple of times during the ELEVEN days that I felt like crap that maybe I should write about it. I was definitely feeling things. And I even had thoughts about how the feelings felt. But it hurt too much to sit up. Typing made me sweaty. And everything made me cough.
Everything.
Such as? Inhaling. (*COUGH*) Exhaling. (*cough*) Lying on my side so my lungs squished each other. (*coughCOUGHcoughCOUGHCOUGHouchCOUGHcough*)
I did go to the doctor. Well, I tried. I ended up at the after-hours clinic — me and everyone else in town. I had to wear a mask, and it gets good and nasty inside those masks really quickly. Short version? It wasn’t the flu. (Also, eww, the flu-test. Fodder for another post.) It wasn’t pneumonia. My chest X-ray was weird, but not pneumatic. It was a sinus infection, so. Plus, “sorry you don’t feel well,” which is nice, but not helpful. I drank a lot of Nyquil(TM) over a four-day period.
I went to work all but 2 of those days. I got sweaty sitting on my desk reading a book to my class. I tried not to breathe more than the air right in front of my head. I did my best to give the kids what they needed without giving them what they really didn’t want. Those 2 sick days, no subs came to take my classes, so it was a gigantic inconvenience (another teacher who has a prep comes in to babysit, and somehow, the work I put out for the kids to do doesn’t get done).
The short version of this long story is that being sick is gross. Also, “productive coughing” sounds like a whole lot more of a positive thing than it actually is. Gross. Gross. Super gross.