Ugh. Some time yesterday I felt my throat closing in on me and I assumed it was just allergies. There’s a fine yellow dusting of pollen covering the area, from automobiles to zebra patterned porch chair cushions. And yet last night, the throat got scratchier and descended through the circles of hell to reach a boiling point… it feels afire and is difficult to swallow. I had bouts of chills and then burning up sweats. There can be little doubt — I’m coming down with a springtime cold.
I hate being sick. I suppose no one likes being sick, even a school kid excited at the prospect of skipping school and lying on the couch all day. Because the price of calling out sick is typically being sick. Oh, sure — there’s playing hooky but then there’s that unending guilt at stranding others and/or the thought of what you’ll need to catch-up on the next day. There are always opportunity costs as my Econ 10 professor once told me, changing my perspective forever.
I’m a particularly terrible sick person. I get grouchy (well… ok… I get grouchier), I feel slower as my head and body ahces and feels encased in a walking Blue Moon Group jello mold. Everything in life seems infinitely worse and things I might have shrugged off on a healthy day, seem cataclysmic to sick-Kevin. And this right now is really only 28 Hours Later, ya know?
Having tried throat lozenges throughout the night, bowls of cereal and (separately) a few dollops of peanut butter, really ANYTHING that might provide a coating/soothing for the sand-papery throat, I’m faced with two necessary realities of the day:
1) I’m going to be a jerk to any and all who are unfortunate enough to cross my path.
2) I really need to go for a run.
The latter is one of those things that when people hear they shake their heads and say, “shouldn’t you just rest and take the day off?” I’m not a streak runner like my Antarctica buddy Chris in that I don’t run every single day. I’m a wannabe streak runner in that I like to run every day. Part of it is caloric erasing need (I stepped on the scale post-road trip and wasn’t surprised my weekend of running debauchery tipped the scales to heavier Kevin… opportunity costs, don’tcha know?). But part of it is the endorphin need, that and a sense of flow and stress relief that got me hooked in the first place.
I have very often used running as a nuclear option on being sick — pushing myself a bit to sweat out the bad germs, giving my body the ultimatum that it needs to suck it up, buttercup, because this is happening. Nine times out of ten it works. But of course that means 10% of the time my body rejects my ultimatum, calls my bluff, and really kicks my mind over matter self in ways that can only be described as with extreme prejudice. And that can be at any time in the three days coming, three days here, three days going typical lifecycle of a cold.
We will see what day 1.5 brings as I’ve donned my running gear and await the dawn itself.
Man, I hate being sick.