Monday, February 19, 2007
Immunity Lost
My vaunted immune system has failed me.
I've always been the type of person who never gets sick, and never takes medicine. I knew that system was bound to fail now that I'm constantly around hundreds of germ sponges every day, but I still had hope it wouldn't. For the past month, though, I've been almost constantly sort-of sick. Never anything really bad that would warrant taking a day off; just enough that I all I want to do is go to sleep. Granted, some of that sleep-lust may be due to my 6 hour a night habit (getting longer, fortunately), but a big part is my body telling me it needs sleep to get better. There were a few days where I was Day-Quil'd up during the day, and Ny-Quil'd down at night. I even went to the store and successfully navigated the scavenger hunt to be treated like a junkie to buy decongestant (who knew it was behind the counter?). After all that, the darn decongestant didn't work. Shoving the pills up my nose might have cleared my sinuses better than swallowing them did. Ugh.
I'm finally on the upswing. I still have a headache, still tired, still coughing, but I have a voice, my nose isn't vacillating between streaming mucus and nonexistent airways, and I'm generally feeling pretty ok. The voice thing was probably the worst. There were two days where I couldn't talk above normal conversational levels. I told my students that they needed to know what I was going to tell them, but I couldn't speak very loud. If they were talking over me I was just going to keep on going. Fortunately, my students are good enough that the classes were pretty self-correcting. Of course, one of those days I subbed for another class and almost had a fight in the classroom. That's another story.
I've always been the type of person who never gets sick, and never takes medicine. I knew that system was bound to fail now that I'm constantly around hundreds of germ sponges every day, but I still had hope it wouldn't. For the past month, though, I've been almost constantly sort-of sick. Never anything really bad that would warrant taking a day off; just enough that I all I want to do is go to sleep. Granted, some of that sleep-lust may be due to my 6 hour a night habit (getting longer, fortunately), but a big part is my body telling me it needs sleep to get better. There were a few days where I was Day-Quil'd up during the day, and Ny-Quil'd down at night. I even went to the store and successfully navigated the scavenger hunt to be treated like a junkie to buy decongestant (who knew it was behind the counter?). After all that, the darn decongestant didn't work. Shoving the pills up my nose might have cleared my sinuses better than swallowing them did. Ugh.
I'm finally on the upswing. I still have a headache, still tired, still coughing, but I have a voice, my nose isn't vacillating between streaming mucus and nonexistent airways, and I'm generally feeling pretty ok. The voice thing was probably the worst. There were two days where I couldn't talk above normal conversational levels. I told my students that they needed to know what I was going to tell them, but I couldn't speak very loud. If they were talking over me I was just going to keep on going. Fortunately, my students are good enough that the classes were pretty self-correcting. Of course, one of those days I subbed for another class and almost had a fight in the classroom. That's another story.
