Woe Unto Me

Seattle finally gets a stretch of amazing weather and I land the biggest whopper of a "summer cold".  I use quotation marks because the popular term does not even begin to describe the one-two punch that is an Epstein-Barr viral infection coupled with a Streptococcus pyogenes bacterial infection.  I have lost three weeks of my life people, three weeks!

When I told my friend what diagnoses had come through the response was, "what are you, twelve?!".  Leave it to me to get a childhood/young adult disease when I'm neither a child nor young adult.  I thought I deserved a pat on the back for avoiding mono but noooooo, turns out it would have been better had I gotten it then instead of now.  And not just for the lack of responsibility when you're twelve.  You know how you feel after you've run up a really big hill?  Not the "yeah, I did it!" feeling but the "oh wow, that was a lot harder than I thought" feeling?  That was eating breakfast.  Or changing clothes.  Or trying to stay awake for a 90 minute movie because you don't have the brain power to do anything else.  And taking a shower is on a whole other level, a whole other, more difficult level.

It is important to remember the positives.
1. For as long as I can remember, I've not slept well.  Problem solved with mono.  Slept like the dead for fourteen to sixteen hours a day.
2. My cat was horribly ill only a month ago and now she's better. This is great because I don't know that I would have been able to take proper care of her while I was down. She has been enjoying snuggling up to me these three weeks.  That's been nice.
3. I'm not going to die, at least not from this.  Better yet, I'm improving.  I still need phone alarms to tell me every eight hours that I need to take an antibiotic (brain's still fuzzy) but I haven't had to take a nap in two days!  My lymph nodes have reduced from strawberries to grapes and I can talk again.  For two weeks I had a sore throat so awful that I became dehydrated due to the pain with swallowing.  No voice for a Chatty Cathy is tough stuff.

With September around the corner the roads will once again be turned over from the teens wandering aimlessly / driving recklessly all over the roads (while texting and updating Facebook on their smart phones) back to the commuters that curse the teens as all adults are meant to do (while emailing and updating Facebook on their smart phones).  Ah, the circle of life.

Here's hoping the weather stays fine for recuperated me to get in another backpacking trip!