posted 2005/07/29 at 18:13
Okay, I promised you all a brief update on what's been happening the past week or so, so I guess it's high time that I delivered here. I'll try to be as to-the-point as I can be here, but if you've read me for any period of time then you know that brevity isn't one of my strong suits.
Anyway, Saturday I was out shopping and stuff, and I'd already gone off-diet that day because of all the emotions I was dealing with regarding the recent posts I'd made about realizing how I don't know how to have fun, and all that "how I play DDR" stuff. I went to a nearby coffeeshop to have a raspberry lemonade and read from one of my books on teaching, when all of a sudden my throat started getting sore. I didn't think much of it at the time, but when I came home I popped a zinc tablet and a couple of cough drops just to be on the safe side.
The sore throat continued on through Sunday, but I didn't pay it too much mind. I had a normal on-diet day in terms of eating all the way through dinner, and I thought something had just irritated my throat for some reason. Within a few minutes, though, my sinuses went from normal to totally haywire, as I started sneezing all over the place and I was hacking up stuff. I thought for certain that I was sick, and started pounding down the cough drops and, once someone was able to make a store run for me, my normal sick-foods (lemonade and salty snacks).
Normally when I start the whole cough-drops-and-lemonade regimen, it helps alleviate the nasty sore throat pain I always have when I'm sick to the point of bearability. This time, however, the pain was disappearing altogether. I'd drink a couple of glasses of lemonade, and it would be like my throat had never been sore in the first place. I spoke with Mom about this, and she suggested that maybe I was having some kind of seasonal allergy that was messing up my sinuses, and that my sinuses were what was making my throat sore. (The thing about that is that every few years I seem to shift between having early-summer allergies and having late-summer allergies, and this year I was definitely having a lot of early-summer allergies.)
As the week progressed, I'd have sore throat and sinus problems in the morning, but after a zinc tablet and some lemonade the problems would be gone, and each day I woke up with less and less sore throat pain. I still stuck with my sick-time regimen, though, because I was still worried that I was getting sick, and with all I've got planned over the next couple of weeks (Penny will be driving through town in a little over a week and she'll be stopping long enough for a walk in the Toledo Botanical Garden, plus I'd like to go down and see Christina and Milena again sometime before school starts back up), the last thing I needed was to get sick. If I was getting sick, I figured I should do everything I could to fight the problems, so that maybe I'd be at 100% by the time Penny came driving through town.
Flash forward to today. When I woke up, my throat was barely giving me problems. I had one cough drop when I woke up, but I didn't have any zinc or lemonade or anything like that, and although my throat feels a little funny right now, it's nothing all that serious. Maybe I did manage to avert a real illness there with quick action, but if this really was an allergic reaction and there was no danger of me getting sick, then I'm mighty miffed that I wrecked my diet for the week for no reason. (I also haven't played DDR/ITG all this week as an additional precaution because, as one of my DDR heroes so eloquently put it in his PSMO AAA video, never play DDR when you're sick.)
The one thing that makes me think that this was an illness was that, in case it didn't come through in my "I don't know how to have fun" and "these are all the different systems I put in place when I play DDR" posts, I was getting incredibly depressed there, and depression does seem to put my body in a state where it's more susceptible to getting sick. Both those posts helped me to see that I have some real neuroses that I need help with. Ironically enough, last Saturday when I started getting the sore throat, I'd felt I'd made a bit of progress in that regard when I did some freewriting on the subject of fun. Still, I know I'll need professional help to really handle these problems, although I won't have long to wait for that since UT offers free counseling to its students/faculty/staff. Of course, that only serves as a reminder that my break is quickly coming to an end, and I only have one thing to say about that: *WHINE!*
Anyway, that's what's been happening with me. What about what's been happening with you?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon