In what is the final update either because I'm about to be 100% better or because this is the lull right before my lungs explode in an airplane lavatory in the mode of quasi-fictional(?) media mogul, I feel pretty good, cough-wise. Luckily for me I have no flights scheduled, so I'm liking my odds.
I should point out as an aside that a cat is literally laying on my right arm and jostling with every keystroke as I type this. I'd like to extend kudos to her for maximizing her intrusiveness in search of comfort and to myself for both persevering and for the blind, self-abnegating indulgence which I'm sure is not a sign of any kind of emotional attachment disorders. Feels great, all of it.
I am about back up to full speed, except for the occasional scratchiness or tightness in the larynx/lungs/areas-required-to-provide-life-giving-air regions a few times a day. For all the time and money spent fucking with pharmaceuticals, regular-ass Ricola is doing a lot of wellness heavy lifting these days. It's like being asked to break things down using an industrial crusher and then finding out you could have done a better job with a pocket knife. But I'm sure the antibiotics and full course of steroids helped in their little ways. Participation medals for everyone.
Right now the issue is that I'm worn out from being well (or at least well-adjacent). Getting back to a lifestyle no longer pre-empted by an assumption of debilitation by disease or its attendant syndromes has been kind of a lot of trouble. I'm back to doing normal stuff like shopping and cooking instead of pushing two buttons on my phone and waiting for soup to appear at my door as if by magic where the inciting incantation is a 20% price mark-up vs. going to get it your goddamned self.
If that wasn't pre-COVID throwback enough, circumstances at work have meant that I've had to go into the office for full days like four days in a row this week, because apparently my office hates the environment (so much driving!) and work-life balance is a lie propagated by Scandinavians to make the rest of us feel bad about ourselves.
There were some out-of-town VIPs visiting, so we all had to make an effort to Be In and Be Seen, sitting at our mostly unused desks inside a building that is constantly climate controlled even though it's empty about 75% of the time. All of it felt pretty fake and energy-wasteful on both power grid and human levels. Mostly what it did was remind me of the Before Times, back when pandemics were only things that happened to China by itself and only really impacted things like flight schedules and the occasional World Cup. So different from now!
Once we shut down entirely in... I was about to give a month and year, but I honestly can't remember exactly when it was anymore. I've got a severe case of COVID Time Dilation where in my head, "two years ago" means absolutely nothing but could also be confidently applied to anything that happened since about 2017. The only time-adjacent thing I'm certain about is my age, but I think the morbid existential panic keeps that in sharp focus, mostly out of spite.
It was hard given the emergent and emergency nature of the pandemic to really appreciate the shifts in logistics and organization as cultural. When I shifted the start of my day from 7 am to 6 am once I realized working at home meant getting up at the same time without having to drive anywhere automatically launched me an hour ahead of the game without losing any sleep and at a significant savings in overall effort, it just seemed practical. Then it felt like cheating a little. Then, once I got used to snapping my laptop shut at 2:30 in the afternoon and just... getting on with my non-working life, that old way of living seemed like such an affront to efficiency on like 14 quantifiable levels.
Going in this last week for a stretch of days was admittedly not a clean comparison as I've kept my 6 am start time, which means getting up even earlier to drive in. And I am *not* one of those sickos who revels in the antidepressant bath of Mother Sunrise's curing gaze or however it is "morning people" rationalize their obvious mental and emotional illness. But there's no way I'm giving up the dopamine drop of being done and grounded, wheels down and parked, while the sun is still up and all the doctor's offices are still running appointments. I'm extra tired, sure, but I've been sitting here in a chair my room under the strict harassment regime of a determined cat instead of in my car being mad about lane-merging protocol. It seems like a better way to go.
And that part about doctor's offices turned out to be a real winner in the past two months. Although if you ask me six months from now when I had that pain-in-the-ass cough, I'll probably say "maybe two years ago?" Some things there aren't any vaccines for (yet).
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