Sick and Tired

I'm tired of being sick and tired. I know that a majority of my issues are self-inflicted which only makes the matter worse. There really is no comfort in knowing that I did this to myself. At least when I broke my ankle playing racquetball, I both won the game even though injured and had a shiny cast to prove I had a boo-boo.

I won nothing. I looked pitiful. I'm still looking pitiful. And there is no cast. I stopped wearing the sling within days because it hurt my neck too much.

I've looked up the treatment for my particular boo-boo and the treatment is to let time heal all wounds. Unless it gets worse and then there are other things that might work, but the essential treatment is to do nothing. I've got that covered.

I cannot straighten my arm. Even if I ignore the pain and just go for it, I cannot straighten my arm. This is a concern. But if I allow time to heal all my wounds, it should be able to straighten my arm at some time in the mists of the future. It should stop hurting eventually, too. Great. I have the exact opposite of the patience-of-a-saint – whatever that may be. I'm completely unenchanted with this whole fiasco. And yet, despite my feelings about it, the boo-boo lingers.

I have been coughing now for three weeks. I thought colds were supposed to last for two weeks with a doctor's help or a fortnight if left alone. Still, it's been over three weeks. My sore throat comes and goes. The cough was almost completely gone and then after a day or two of respite, it came back with such force that I sometimes look for a lung or two to go flying across the room with the rest of my innards in hot pursuit. I cough until I can't breath. I cough until I'm choking and gasping for air. I cough so hard that I sometimes try to even bend my left arm to help in some way driving a white-hot shaft of pain up to my shoulder and out my fingertips.

I've given up trying to sleep. If I lie down, I nearly choke to death. I've camped out in a recliner the last couple nights and dozed in between choking fits. I've sucked on cough drops until my whole mouth is puckered. I knocked over a glass of water in the middle of the night giving me even one more thing to whine about.

With holding my arm funny and sleeping in a chair and choking and hacking my way through my days, my arthritic neck is snapping like a turtle during mating season (do snapping turtles snap more during mating season?). My neck is so full of creaking that I listen to the snap, crackle, pop each time I turn my head. I'm sure it is loud enough for others to hear, maybe as far away as downtown.

I had a massage scheduled for this afternoon, but I can't lie down without choking to death and most therapists don't like you coughing in their faces. So regardless of how much good it might have done for my arm and definitely would have done for my neck and shoulders, I had to cancel the one thing that was sure to make me feel better. I will hopefully be well enough by next Tuesday, when my boo-boo will be three weeks old, my cold will be four weeks old and my neck will be striving for the century mark.

Since cough syrups that come by prescription only contain codeine, and since I had no such cough syrup in the house, in the middle of the night I devised my own strategy. After waking yet again in the middle of a choking fit, I realized that the good ER doctor had given me pain pills for my arm. Hydrocodone, synthetic codeine. I took one. I actually got a few hours of uninterrupted sleep and woke up with a neck so stiff I could barely turn my head. But sleep! Blissful sleep.

I then noticed that my caffeine intake from the day before had been too low and that my now throbbing arteries in my head were not happy with me. With enough time and freshly brewed coffee, this passed quickly. If only my lungs, elbow, and neck could speak to the coffee-happy arteries.

Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans. And so the saga of the boo-boo continues.