This Cold Really Took Me Down (or Several Days Of Doing Nothing)

I wrote a very short post on Friday about being sick. I wrote that when I was so sick that I can’t believe the post had coherent sentences. I don’t get sick that often (although I was surprised looking back at old blog posts that I was sick last fall) and this cold I caught was possibly one of the worst ones I’ve had as an adult.

One of the weird things about this cold was I know exactly when I was exposed to the germs. I was on a date on Monday and the guy I saw told me on Tuesday that he was sick. So I knew the day I caught it was Monday. I could look at these different timeline things online about what symptoms to expect each day of being sick which I usually don’t look at. And since I wasn’t feeling off until Wednesday, I missed the first few days of the cold.

Thursday morning when I woke up, I almost passed out trying to stand. If I had to drive to a job, there would have been no way I could have worked. I barely made it from my bedroom to my desk. I have no idea how I managed to work on Thursday, but I did. And as soon as I was done with work, I took a 4 hour nap and then got ready for bed and went to sleep. Friday was just as bad if not worse. I was feeling like I was ready to pass out at any moment. I couldn’t breathe through my nose and I was constantly trying to clear my throat so I never felt like I could catch my breath.

Saturday was pretty bad too, but I managed to stand long enough to take a shower. And after that, I was able to drive 2 blocks to the grocery store to get some cold medication and soup. And on Sunday, I finally was able to breathe through one side of my nose and didn’t feel like my head was so heavy it was going to fall off my neck.

With the exception of the 10 minutes I was at the grocery store, from Wednesday evening until Monday morning I never left my house. And even though I was in my house all that time, my house became a huge mess. I wasn’t cleaning and didn’t really care that things were piling up. I know that I could have been worse, but this cold was really brutal and took me out of things for a while. I love lazy days sometimes, but having 4 days in a row where not only I was lazy but I felt awful was not something I wanted to have.

I know that lying low and taking things easy was exactly what I needed to do. If I had pushed myself more I could have gotten sicker or made this last longer. I’m still not totally better yet, but starting on Sunday I was finally over the hump and getting better. And knowing that I’m at the tail end of this thing is helpful. But I really just want to get back to feeling normal. I know there is a joke online about how you are never grateful to be able to breathe through your nose until you can’t do it because you are sick and you feel like you never appreciated your body doing that. I’m still in that phase right now and I can’t wait to be back to where I don’t think about my body being able to do anything.

Hopefully I won’t be sick again for a long time and that this will be the worst cold I have for another decade or so. I hate being so out of it and feeling like this. Sick days as an adult are nothing like sick days when you were a kid (and you had someone to take care of you and you spent the day watching tv). I can’t wait to have the energy to clean my house since now it needs a major deep clean.

And even though I got this cold from a guy I went on a date with, I will still give him another chance since I really can’t blame him for this. He didn’t realize I would get sick from seeing him. And if he felt even half as miserable as I did over the past week, then I feel like that is a bit of payback for him getting me sick.