To cope, I confined myself to the warmest place in the house (on the couch in the living room) with the fireplace cranked, drinking juicy juice and the odd caffeinated beverage. Eating nothing.
During the first 48 hours of difficultly both breathing and swallowing – which I will compare to circling the lower regions of hell - my cats didn’t recognize my newly acquired, raspy male voice (think cartoon character: Dr. Mrs.The Monarch/Dr. Girlfriend) and ran in bug-eyed terror away from me.
No sleeping, either.
In the following 48 hours, ascending slowly upward through the less hellish dimensions, I was breathing easy - but shaking and coughing up god-knows-what-frighteningly-dark-crap every thirty minutes, not to mention the never-ending runny nose, fever, and traveling earaches.
Where in the world could I have gotten this virulent of an infection?
Whenever my husband Dan or I come up sick, we can usually pin our exposure down to gatherings (under confinement, indoors) where young children are present. Since we don’t run in kiddie-centric circles, our tolerance to schoolbourne illnesses is quite low.
Though we attended an outdoor party last week, there’s the more likely possibility that I contracted this from handling money at farmer’s market.
* Currency can contact a multitude of hands every day; and though children have equal opportunities for exposure to bacteria they are at least, washed on a regular basis.
* I’m certain that the bank doesn’t pasteurize money before they redistribute it, and equally certain I coughed on the last deposit. (Just kidding)
There’s another money-laundering-related joke somewhere, but I can’t find it.
Other than those theories, I never use sanitary wipes on the rims of soda cans before I drink from them. Perhaps I should use straws.
So here I lay.
Not quite well enough to get bored, with a serious case of attention deficit disorder; watching so-bad-it’s-funny movies on the Syfy Channel, and sleeping the sweaty, fitful slumber of the NyQuil addicts.
