Not To Be Dramatic or Anything…

So I’ve had my fair share of sickness in my 23 (very nearly 24) years of being alive but up until a few years ago I thought my immune system was just too good at beating illnesses. I used to be the type of person that could wake up with a cold in the morning and go to bed that night feeling perfectly fine.

But now it takes me a solid week to go from the first sniffle of sickness to full health again. Is it just because the older I’m getting my immune system has already given up on me? Or is it just because the bugs that choose to infect me these days are just superbugs? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

I went to bed on Wednesday night and I was tossing and turning all night, making regular trips to the bathroom to blow my nose. Hoping that my asthmatic lungs would let me have a few molecules of oxygen so that I would live through the night. I probably got a few hours of sleep before my alarm woke me up on Thursday morning at 5:20am.

I managed to get ready for my shift and I spent the entire morning complaining how I had this annoying little cold that wouldn’t go away. One of my lovely colleagues gave me some cold and flu tablets and I made it through the rest of the shift without any more hitches.

On Friday the cold still hadn’t gone away but to add to my suffering I started to cough towards the end of my shift, always fun. My head was hurting, my lungs were burning and my nose was dry and stuffy because it couldn’t decide whether it was going to be blocked or runny.

On Saturday and Sunday I had to phone in for my shifts. I was up all night coughing until my throat felt ragged and couldn’t walk from one end of the room to the other without getting out of breath. I have never felt worse.

You know in movies and books when a character is coughing up blood it usually means they are dying? Well in real life it could just be because you’ve been coughing for three days straight and your throat is done in. When I coughed up blood I kept getting flashing images through my head. Is this the end? Did I accidentally swallow glass? Have I been mysteriously poisoned?

For example in The Hunger Games (spoilers I guess…) President Snow is shown a few times to be coughing up blood into clean white handkerchiefs. When we get the back story to this we learn that it is because he used to trick his allies into drinking poison by drinking the same poison. Even though he took the antidotes for them the poison still caused sores to open on his throat that would never heal.

So forgive my dramatic reader's brain from making that ridiculous and nonsense connection. I always like to imagine my life as far more dramatic than it actually is. I think I’ve actually been enjoying my short time off despite feeling sick because I’ve spent most of my time reading new books.

But anyway the conclusion to my ramblings isn’t that exciting. I went back to work on Monday despite still not feeling 100% and even now on Tuesday I still feel awful.

No amount of painkillers, cold and flu tablets and boxes of tissues have so far healed me but at least I’m still alive, unlike President Snow.