sick, headachey, tired, cold

[tielan]

I hate being ill. I usually enjoy such good health that being sick is a nightmare for me: all the things I want to do, all the things I should be doing, all the things I can't do.

I might have to cancel the foodie dinner I was going to tonight. I was looking forward to it, too...

Comments

[thothmes]

Sorry. It's miserable being sick, and you're right, it's worse when you aren't accustomed.

When something is going around, Eldest Daughter will cough twice, blow her nose once, and announce that she's sick. At that point, she's over it, and moving on. Only Son will catch the same thing from her, and spend the next three days lying limply on the floor with a fever, trying to make sense of what's on TV, and clutching a wastebasket, just in case...

Thing is, Only Son sees being sick as routine. It happens. Not fun, but wait for it, and it goes away. Always does.

On those very rare occasions that Eldest Daughter really does get sick, she makes up in depth of misery for all the times she's cruised through and her brother has lain at death's door. When she's genuinely sick, she takes it personally. God himself has decided to visit her with plague, and has turned away from her in his wrath. Oh, woe is her!

My own susceptibility tends to lie somewhere between that of my kids. I don't get sick that often, but when I do get Sick with a capital S, I take the third path. I find some place dark and quiet, curl up in a ball, and hibernate until it all goes away.

Beloved Husband, the doctor, takes his own advice and gets plenty of rest, and takes in plenty of liquids.

I do hope you get to the foodie dinner, though. It sounds like fun, although not as much fun if you are at the stage where you can hardly smell a thing, because then you'd be missing all the subtleties of taste anyway.

Beloved Husband's advice for colds is that most over-the-counter cold medications lessen the severity of the symptoms, but lessen the course of the disease. The exception to this is zinc lozenges taken at the very beginning of the cold, which can sometimes knock back both the severity and duration of the symptoms.