Hey, everybody.  I know I haven’t posted in a while.  I’m currently on vacation.  The cold and the snow finally got to me, so I immediately concluded that I needed some time alone to rest in a heated paradise sipping fruity drinks by the water.  It sounded perfect to me.

I more or less got what I asked for, but it turned out not to be quite what I was envisioning.  Instead, my time alone has turned into a virtual quarantine.   My rest has turned into mandatory bed rest that causes me to sleep more than I’m comfortable with.  My heated paradise has turned into a two-week-long fever which my body has so hospitably housed.  My fruity drink is massive amounts of orange juice.  And my lungs have graciously provided the water for their own underwater adventure.

Next time, I’m getting a better travel agent.

In all seriousness, I’ve been ill since the last day of January.  The first day I felt sick, I purchased some Robitussin Cough & Chest Congestion to begin immediately so that I could cut the illness off before it found any real purchase against my immune system, but that failed.  My illness progressively got worse, and the cold-like symptoms that I was presenting kept magnifying and new ones kept appearing.  I finally went to the doctor (who is an hour to an hour and a half away by subway/walking) on 5 February, because my breathing had dramatically deteriorated the previous night.  My breathing was very labored and shallow, nearing to the point of hyperventilation.  When I went to the doctor, they gave me a nebulizer treatment.  That with quick, shallow breathing resulted in my almost fainting.  My body was tingling and shaking afterwards, and I was incredibly dizzy.  I was put on steroids to strengthen my lungs and given cough syrup with codeine for the nasty cough I had.  The doctor diagnosed me as having a cold from hell in combination with a severely acute case of bronchitis.

My breathing got a bit better while I was on the five-day supply of steroids, but my cold symptoms continued to worsen.  After I finished the steroids, my breathing got worse than before, only this time it was coupled with chest pain, especially when I was breathing in.  My breathing wasn’t fast-paced — it was more controlled and it was slower, but it was actually quite a bit worse.  I called the doctor’s office to ask whether I should go to the hospital, and the nurse who answered told me that the hospital was not necessary; she set up an appointment for me to meet with a different doctor on that afternoon (10 February) so that they could check out my lungs again.

I went in, and they had a doctor and a med student see me.  I was given another nebulizer treatment, because they couldn’t hear my lungs.  Even after the nebulizer treatment, they had difficulty.  They could hear part of my lungs, but not all of them.  Anyway, it turned out that there is fluid in there and that I have pneumonia.  (It was the med student who found it.)  I wasn’t really paying attention at the time, because I was afraid they’d send me to the hospital, and I was busy trying to plan ways to ensure that didn’t happen.  Fortunately, I managed to catch “hospitalization is not necessary” followed very quickly by “as long as you take it easy.”  Apparently the instantaneous glow of joy in my eyes by the first part did not go unnoticed on their end.

I’ve been cleared for class, as they understand that in grad school, attendance is rather necessary.  Fortunately, I only have class two days a week.  Unfortunately, I have six hours of class those two days.  So far, I have been unable to attend a whole day, but I only have class on Thursday this week, so I am hoping that if I rest up enough until then that I will be able to last the whole day.  Class is pretty much the only activity I am cleared for at the moment, though.  I am not supposed to really go out unless absolutely necessary, because the cold irritates my lungs and my breathing.  Also, people are outside, and people carry germs.  My immune system is sufficiently defunct at the moment, so I have to be extremely cautious and avoid people as much as possible.  It is my understanding that they pose far more of a risk to me than I to them.  Actually, they don’t really need to worry about me at all.  So, I am more or less in quarantine until I feel better.  Even then, I am supposed to attempt to maintain limited exposure and to exercise extreme caution for several more weeks, because my health is still in a rather precarious state.  My breathing has gotten better somewhat from the steroids and the antibiotics, but I still cannot sleep lying down.  I don’t get enough air flow to my lungs, so I have to sleep propped up by pillows.  This does not make sleeping any easier, especially after the scare I had last week when my pillows shifted during the night and I slipped down and ended up suffocating and turning blue.  Fortunately, that only happened once.

So, that has more or less been my little “vacation” the past two weeks.  On the bright side, though, insomnia has not been an issue as such.  Although, I really am starting to believe that Murphy’s Laws and all of their corollaries dictate my existence.