The afternoon of May 23rd I had to reluctantly admit that what I was determined to call “allergies” was really a cold. If noses run in your family like they do in mine, you can appreciate the difficulty of telling the difference.
It was this mild cold that half the kids had already had, no big deal. I sneezed a lot, and then it was supposed to be over.
Interesting thing one: Nothing bad happened, and it still managed to own a month of my life and counting. Normally what happens with a cold is that if there aren’t any complications, it annoys you and then you get better.
Instead what I had was no complications, and tangible but glacially-paced recovery. So I go weeks constantly asking myself, “Surely something terrible has happened because no one is this tired, with this obnoxious of a cough, for this long,” except that no, nothing terrible was happening. Not a single sign of a secondary infection or anything else. Every day was in fact just a tiny bit healthier than the day before. A perfectly normal recovery, only carried out in ultra-slow motion.
So that aggravated me, because I was impatient to be back to the fully-functional-esque person I was in earlier April – May. I’m thinking, looking back, that ultra-slow recovery is the same reason February and March were the disaster that they were; or maybe it was something else.
Interesting thing two: Just as I’m turning the corner I start getting a resurgence of the infamous “I feel like I’m buzzed” thing that was the fascinating side note to my initial (untreated) illness. Which leads to a fair bit of lying when I see people, because after hiding in the cave with the cold long enough, when you see someone you’re so happy to see fresh humans that when they ask you how you’re doing you say, “Good!” even though what you mean is not, “I’m doing well,” but rather, “It is good to see you.”
And here’s where the interesting cropped up: My allergies really truly went away. If noses run in your family like they do in mine, not sneezing is an aberration.
Curiously, when I first got dramatically ill in 2014, something that happened is that the allergies completely cleared up and stayed cleared up.
So today I googled “allergies autonomic nervous system” and it turns out this is a thing. Essentially hayfever (cats, dust, pollen) and my presumed type of IST are opposites. Not quite as neatly as all that, but something like it, which will presumably be helpful to figure out.
For the moment all that tells me is that should this renewed spell of sickliness pass, I should plan to start sneezing again. Meanwhile, we’ve got a topic for the visit to re-up the meds this summer, which might entertain or even intrigue. We’ll see.
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In the meantime, given that 50% of the last six months have been “temporary” disasters, I need to quick get just organized enough to hand off the remainder of my responsible-person obligations. Prayers in that direction appreciated, both that the intended handing-off will happen efficiently and well, and that I’ll make good decisions about precisely how much I can commit to in the year ahead.