This has been a little slice of hell, but it’s finally starting to turn around. The first few days were a nightmare of flu-like hot & cold, but the last few days have been a nightmare of non-functional lungs. For a while there I could only breathe in tiny gulps… in a burst of scientific enthusiasm, I blew bubbles and figure that I was down to a volume of not much more than a ping pong ball. If I remained vertical and immobile, the lungs would be more or less stable; but if I went more than 15 degrees off plumb, they’d go bonkers and I’d have horrific, pointless coughing fits that would couple with the minimal lung function to consume the very last erg of energy. Efforts to sleep have, for the last 48 hours, proven to be largely failures.
Today my lung volume is greatly expanded and they are more tolerant of off-axis conditions. You’d think that this would allow me to finally get some sleep… nope. Best I can do is lay there motionless for two hours at a stretch, with perhaps a few brief episodes of micro-sleep. My brain is still a mess due to the lack of sleep, but it’s coming back on line. Hour after hour propped in front of the TV staring blankly at overly-enthusiastic self-deluded fools chasing bigfoot didn’t melt my brain, but, sadly, neither did it put me to sleep. Gah.
Also: my appetite is *gone.* Yesterday I had two bites of a Hot Pocket and one slice of bread; today, three spoons of oatmeal. And everything just tastes *wrong.* Mostly everything – food & drinks – that I used to like, now I don’t. On the other hand, an energy drink that has always been pretty vile now tastes… not that bad. Shrug.
I have high hopes that today I will be able to get back to work on things. I spent much of yesterday with the laptop I do my US Bomber Projects diagrams on… but never once had the initiative to so much as turn the damned thing on. Freakin’ zombie apocalypse.
I also notice that pretty much the last thing I did before getting ill was working outside on cyanotype blueprints. I can’t help but put two and two together here… physical labor in the cold seems to have led to sickness. So… no more cyanotypes. Not until spring, anyway.