marching forward wheezily
I have a cold. Probably, it's actually double pneumonia, or some variant of a lung disease previously unknown to science. J says it's a cold though, and stop being so bloody melodramatic.
There is a cough with it. In fact, it is mainly cough, with a very occasional sneeze.
I don't think there's a polite way of saying "There's SO MUCH MUCUS," without the word mucus sounding a bit yuk. I could go with the more schoolboy-ish 'snot' but it doesn't seem proper to use that sort of language on a blog, when I am trying to use the correct terminology for the sheer amount of mucus. But mucus is just yuk – a nasty slimy word that sticks to your paragraph and drools and drips all over it whenever you use it.
There is also a lot of ache. Joints ache. Every metatarsal in my feet aches at the joint. Knees, hips, wrists, fingers – it all aches. My eyes feel like they're two sizes too big for my eye sockets, and they ache.
And I cough, so much. Last evening I coughed with every breath. It was like something was stuck in my throat, but no amount of coughing could clear it. But it tickled the throat lining enough to create the irritation every time I breathed. Irritatingly. So I coughed about two seconds after I last coughed, and managed to sneak a breath in between coughs every now and then.
J has it too. In fact she was the one that brought it home and came down with it first. She still has it, after nearly a week, so it looks like I'm in for this extreme irritation (the cold, not J) for another few days yet. That's the trouble with going out into civilisation like she does, going to shops, and work, and having a social life.
But I do none of that and still get sick. It's not fair.
My breathing is short, panting all the time with minor exertions, and sometimes the coughs come unannounced after a respite of a few minutes.
Yesterday I was taking a sip of warm and soothing tea only for a cough to occur before I had swallowed it. Consequently my laptop and my shirt were soaked with the splatter pattern of a mouthful of tea, that would be proud to be the blood spray shot in a slasher movie, and the explosiveness of it made it actually spurt upwards, so it went up my nose and covered my glasses and fringe too. So I sat there looking at J, she looked at me. Dripping tea off my surprised and somewhat shocked face – and coughing some more.
We laughed, because there was absolutely nothing else you could have really done. And then we both coughed afterwards for ages, because laughing irritates your airways while you have a persistent death rattle apparently.
I decided to postpone a CT scan I had an appointment for. I couldn't see myself being able to do the breathing then holding my breath they need for nice sharp scans.
It was a slightly unexpected scan appointment, which I thought was to do with the regular checks they want to keep making on my heart. However it turns out that my last heart scan showed everything fine in that department, but they saw something incidental in my lung that they wanted to take another look at.
Yep, I thought that as well. Apparently it's benign in a high percentage of cases, but they're just comparing to see if it's grown over the last six months. If it has? Well, let's not go there until we have to.
Anyway, exercise has been postponed for a while. I had been getting on with my press-ups target but have recorded zeroes for a few days now. In fact, almost any activity is temporarily cancelled while I wait for all this to blow over.
Or, when I have the delayed CT scan, blow up.
End of March stands at 8134 of my 10,000 push-ups in a year target done (81.34%) The end of March is 176 days since I started, which is 48.22% of the 365. I think I'm going to do it. But it doesn't look like I'll get to 100% of the target in 50% of the time now.
NB: It is NOT Covid. Have tested, all negative. Hurrah.
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