Ploughing on regardless …

Don’t you just hate being ill?  I consider myself to be very fortunate with regard to my health.  I rarely suffer illness, but this means that when I do, I seem to feel it all the more.  Of course my darling wife says that men always make a meal of their illnesses, but then she visits the medicine cabinet in a flash for the slightest of maladies - no backbone, I say!

Anyway, I’ve been suffering a heavy cold for about 4 days now.  It’s been miserable.  The cold was  one of those real stinkers that come complete with sinus pains, headaches, a streaming nose that will not stop, the aches that run up and down your back like they’re competing in an olympic relay race, and now … the irritating cough that will not let up.  Some might just give up and go to bed.  Some might sit with their lemsip and overdose on daytime TV until it went away.  Unfortunately I’m not one of those people. 

 When I was in my teens my standard cure for a cold was a brisk 6 mile run.  Now that I’ve left my teens well behind me, I have to settle for a 4 mile run - the knees don’t like it if I go much further.  The run on day 1 didn’t rid me of the cold, but it did pep me up a bit - enough that I managed to write another 1750 words of my novel later in the day.  On day 2 I went for another 4 mile run.  Still the cold persisted.  I felt particularly awful, but I managed another 1600 words, updated my website, caught up on some paperwork and cut the grass.  Day 3 I didn’t run, but despite a miserable morning when my brain would not engage, I did write another 2000 words in the afternoon and went to the advanced Tae Kwon Do class in the evening - bad mistake!  I had picked up a couple of blisters from the running, but I picked up a mass more from the martial arts class.  I’d never been to the advanced class before.  It’s a big step up from the beginner class that I normally attend.  I was the lowest grade there and by the end of the session I reckon I had sweated more than anyone.  Twenty minutes of free sparring against a selection of black and red belts at the end of the class left me looking rather like Odo from Deep Space 9 after he’d been trying to hold his shape for too long!  (For those who are not fans of Star Trek I felt, and looked, much like a melting waxwork model.)

This morning the worst of the cold had gone.  However, I now ache in places I didn’t know existed.  I also have blisters on my blisters, but I’m not ready to lay down and die just yet.  It wasn’t a writing day, so I caught up on some housework, spent more time in the garden and was run ragged by the kids (especially the eldest, who insisted on a water fight as she felt she had a fighting chance with me in my current state!) until Doctor Who appeared on the TV, allowing me a well deserved sit down.

 With any luck the cold will be history by tomorrow and life will slow down to its normal, manic pace again.