Sick and Retired

Around twenty-four hours ago my body decided that I must have consumed something in the past twenty-four hours that it did not like. There are the normal methods of eliminating things unwanted by the body, but it had been many, many hours since I’d eaten anything, so generally once an undesirable gets far enough through the digestive cycle it’s only going in one direction… My body thought otherwise and continually tried to expel whatever it was by any means necessary. Not fun. And it didn’t really work, ‘cause there didn’t seem to be much of anything to get rid of. Ugh.

Whatever I was planning to do (mostly continuing the kitchen sink replacement drama… don’t ask), that wasn’t going to happen, in that my body continued this fruitless cycle at least three more times from early morning until later in the day. I confined myself to the few feet from my bed to the bathroom. Then next thing I knew it was 5pm.

This wasn’t the first time that I attempted to sleep off some illness, but it was the most dramatic. I kept thinking about all of the times that I went to work even though I had the sniffles or beginnings of a sour throat and resorted to DayQuil and hiding an old t-shirt that I could use to blow my nose. But when it was something gastrointestinal, I knew that I never wanted to take chances at work (in the classroom). Respiratory, as long as I can still talk, we’re going in. Stomach discomfort, weigh that one very carefully. So, in my previous life I would have had to wake up before 5AM to write lesson plans for the day (that no one would follow) and make sure all parties were informed by 6:30am that I’m not going to be in. And then try to ride out the storm… Toward the end of my career if something felt bad enough to warrant not going in to work I usually took at least two-days off to make sure I was “over it.” I can’t remember how may sick-days I still had un-used when I retired, and because I was less than ten-years with the district, they just evaporated when I left and I certainly couldn’t take the days off in-sequence before the end of the school year (over two weeks, maybe more, I don’t remember). Now I just go back to bed and rearrange my schedule mentally. No fun.

And we’re at that time of year when everyone says that you need to enjoy your time outside because the weather is warming up, but not too warm (yet). Yeah, I didn’t leave the bedroom all day, and it was feeling warm enough inside that I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to turn on the fans or A/C to cool things down a bit. That’s the other indicator that my healthy is wonky: when my body is struggling to maintain its temperature and I go from too cold to too hot. Ack.

I shared my plight with Debra and she said that maybe I just needed the sleep. My sleep schedule has been a mess, which screws with my eating schedule, but this was a rather dramatic way for my body to express itself. Anyway, I think I’m going to spend another day recovering from whatever it was that declared war on my gut. Hope y’all are doing better than moi… onward and upward!