A Mommy Story

I came home from BlogHer a week and a half ago full of energy and full of ideas. It seems to happen every year, and I spend the first two weeks home trying to mentally sort these new blogging ideas and choose where I want to start first.

Only this year, most of that energy was abruptly stopped four days in when I started to get sick. I had already heard others saying how they came down with the post-conference crud, and by Wednesday I felt certain I was in the clear from it.

But then Thursday, I woke up exhausted. Utterly exhausted. Friday was the same, along with a slight sore throat. I tried to dismiss it as dehydration and not enough sleep, drinking more water and trying to go to bed earlier to combat it.

Over the weekend, the exhaustion continued, and the lymph glands in my throat were swollen. I was definitely getting sick, but I didn’t really have a lot of symptoms yet. It wasn’t until Sunday night that I started to get the stuffy nose and (again) the sore throat to tell me this was a full-blown cold coming in.

And now it’s Wednesday, and I feel like I’m only hitting the peak of this germ infestation. This might possibly be the slowest moving cold EVER.

I’d like to think it took so long because my body put up a valiant effort to fight it off, holding the line for several days before eventually being overwhelmed by the viral enemy. In that case, I’d expect the cold to be weaker from the battle casualties, making only a brief appearance to plant its mucousy flag in triumph before my immune system regrouped and kicked its ass.

Instead, I think this cold virus has taken the lazy approach. Seeing that my immune defenses were already weakened from travel, it didn’t see the need to amass forces quickly, taking its sweet time to build up gradually, completely fooling my stressed out white blood cells, who were only looking for critical mass enemies. By the time my leukocytes sounded the alarm, the cold was already entrenched and easily overcame them.

That’s all a fancy way of saying I’ve felt miserable for nearly a week now and today is the worst day yet and why won’t this cold go away already and waaaaaahhhh!

I was lucky to avoid being sick this summer until now. But no amount of Emergen-C or zinc is helping shorten this long-game cold. I can handle many of the symptoms of being sick – stuffy noses aren’t so bad when I didn’t breathe much through my nose for the first 22 years of my life. (I had sinus surgery to correct that.) The lack of energy, however, is frustrating.

Here’s hoping I’ll be back to my usual self soon, and that my energy will return so I can get back to planning out new blog posts with a brain that isn’t quite so foggy.

We’re two weeks away from the start of the school year, which means I have exactly two weeks to get over this cold and rebuild my immune defenses before the kids bring home shiny new germs from their classmates.

Maybe I’d better have my immune system double-down on those defenses.