Tag: Me Myself I

After two weeks of feeling like shit, worrying about Covid, pneumonia and all other things what could kill me, I finally took me off to an emergency care place and got an X-ray.
Diagnosis:  nothing serious.
What I have:  a bad case of bronchitis.
Treatment: Mucinex, also something to suppress the coughing spasms at night, lots of rest.

Yesterday was the first day of such treatment, and last night I slept for six solid hours before being woken up not by coughing, but by inhaling saliva in my sleep, i.e. just my body fucking with me like it usually does.

So far today, from 5am until this post, I’ve coughed about a dozen times (all “productive”), which was more like my half-hourly (dry) rate beforehand.

Am I getting better?  Let’s just say I’m cautiously optimistic.  So unless you hear differently from me, assume the latter.

I should mention that even before I got the “No-COVID” news last night, I’d been feeling better.

Not because of the anti-‘Rona drugs, of course, but because in a rare moment of clarity, I worked out that over the past six nights, I’d had maybe half an hour’s uninterrupted sleep per night because the fucking painful continuous coughing was waking me up.

So I put on my Big Boy Slippers and slouched over to the medicine cabinet right after New Wife left for work.

How, I asked myself, was I going to put myself into a deep sleep without resorting to extreme measures?

Three simple ingredients came to mind:

• Robitussin.  My old friend “Robi” has always worked for me in the past
• Max Strength Tylenol.  Another old friend
• Willpower (which I’ll explain in a moment).

Dosages:  1 British Standard Mouthful of Robitussin (none of that stupid little cup thing they stick on the bottle).  1 BSM, based on my drinking experience with 6X ale, works out to about a quarter of an Imperial pint.  3 Tylenol tablets (1500mg of acetaminophen, according to the bottle)

…which leaves us with the all-important ingredient, willpower.

In my case, this involves not fighting off sleep, but actively pursuing it.  (Anyone who’s done military service knows what I’m talking about here:  you grab sleep whenever you can get it.)  But the second facet of willpower is to refuse to let whatever happens while you’re sleeping cause you to open your eyes.  So a coughing fit?  recognize and ignore the pain.  Dog licking your face?  punch and go back to sleep.  Thirst?  fuck that; deal with it later.  Blowjob?  push her away roughly.  (This last did not work so well when I was younger, admittedly.)

But you get the idea.

So I popped the Tylenol, washed them down with a huge slug of Robi, lay down on the living-room sofa with but a stadium rug for cover (didn’t want to bring heat / cold into the equation), and closed my eyes.

I woke up over seven hours later, feeling so much better that I sat up suddenly.  That was a mistake, and when I sat up again, more slowly, I spent about five minutes coughing phlegm up — and felt really much better, despite the pain in my throat.

I was even able to throw some posts together for today and the weekend, which I had not had the energy to do earlier in the week.

Let’s see how it goes from here.