When You're Sick, There's No Place Like Home

I'm still sick - still coughing and sounding awful and not getting a good night's sleep and feeling sluggish and tired.  Okay, if I'm honest, I'm very slowly improving, but HELLO, IT'S BEEN A WEEK. 

Today, I had a meeting with a hospital leader in which I coughed and carried on all the way through...god, how embarrassing.  This respiratory gomboo - whatever it is, exactly - seems to flare up when I talk. Or eat. Or try to be charming.  Personally, I hate it when people who appear to be a walking plague invade my personal space.  Take your snotty self and go home.

I am officially a snotty self.

At around noon today, I ask myself why I don't just go home and take the rest of the week off to relax and get well.  So that's exactly what I do.  I come home, put on my sweats and drink lukewarm water with grapefruit and orange juice (my Mom used to swear this would cure anything).  Then I sit outside in the sun, moving to the shade and back and forth until I come into the house and watch an episode of 'Army Wives' that my television automatically records each season.  This series used to be good, but now the core plot is the same in every show, and some false sense of drama (another suicide bomber in Iraq!) takes the full commercial-laced hour until they all realize their loved ones are safe and hug it out at the end.  I cry every time.

My uncle died today.  He was 90 years old.  Dad tried to call my silenced-and-in-my-purse phone last night to tell me he was doing badly, then shared that news during exchanged texts as I was getting ready for work this morning.  I found out when I got home that my uncle had, in fact, died.  Dad and I haven't talked since then, but I'm sure he has the news and I wonder how he's taking it, as he and my uncle considered themselves friends.  We'll talk in the morning, as we always do, when we're both in the mood to process and ponder.  Neither of us are night people, and should I call him now, one of us would cut the call short before any meaningful conversation could occur.  Probably me, due to a coughing attack.

And I have to think B-man is sick of me being sick.  He has his own routine that efficiently handles every aspect of our life, and I can imagine feeling that my space was being invaded if I was in his shoes.  But he insists that's not the case and I have agreed - finally - to let him take care of me in every way that he can.  It's so good to be home. 

Image from guardian.co.uk