Coughing flower! (Photo credit: Lucia..)

I was just looking over our monthly credit card statement and it tells a sad story. With the exception of Long Suffering Husband’s weekly trips to get gas, every single transaction we’ve had in the last month is either a prescription from CVS for me and my whoop or food. We’re both very busy at the day jobs with lots of late hours and my body’s been playing its own private version of Oregon Trail so we’ve been eating a lot of take-out or similar (such as grabbing chicken salad and rolls from the grocery store which is basically only a slightly healthier/cheaper version of takeout) because no one feels like cooking.

We sleep. We work. We eat. Just like those fat workaholic grasshoppers from Bug’s Life.

We are excitement personified over here.

But wait! What’s that? Do you hear that? That… uncharacteristic silence? That unfamiliar sound can only be *gasp* the sound of Hillary NOT coughing.

While the virus will still be kicking around my system for at least another month, we seem to have finally managed my cough with a medicated inhaler. I’m hardly coughing at all! It’s very exciting. I’d almost forgotten what the sensation was like.

Unfortunately, there was a bump in the road where one of the meds they had me on made me exceedingly sick to my stomach so I spent a week moaning and feeling mostly like death (but a new and original kind of death entirely different from the misery of the whoop) until we figured out which medicine it was and my doctor told me that I could stop it. So, it’s only the last day or so where the bad medicine (not the Bon Jovi kind) is out of my system and I can actually enjoy the whole not coughing thing.

Not coughing is glorious. I *highly* recommend it.

Anyway, oddly enough, life did not stop to accommodate my distress so I’ve also been working. I’ve actually been rather productive throughout the entire illness mostly because I was miserable and I figured, “Well, if I’m going to feel awful, I might as well feel awful while working!” which is the sort of insane logic I live my life by. The last two weeks in particular would have been over-busy for a normal, perfectly healthy me and this extra work will continue through this week so it’s been quite a busy month.

I’m exhausted, but richer for it.  (Not a metaphor. I made lots of money. I like money.)

Of course, there’s still a lot of stuff that I’m behind on which is to be expected. Today was my first official day of feeling better for real and, while it was great to feel like myself again, there was this terrifying undercurrent of “How the heck am I going to get back up to normal speed again after just about 2 months of weirdness?” with a definite dash of “Exactly how did I ever live at this pace in the first place?” I owe just about everyone I’ve ever met an email or phone call and there’s way too much I let slide while illness was whooping my butt. (See what I did there?)  It’s going to be interesting for a while.

I am, for example, completely behind on Screnzy. Not the official 100 page goal, I’m right on pace for that thanks to all the write-ins and word wars. Thank goodness I’m an ML and feel obligated to attend every single event because I think I actually haven’t written a single word outside of a write-in.  I know, I know. I’m pathetic.

But, I’m insanely behind on my personal writing and Script Frenzy goals for this month. I need to seriously step it up. I’m about a NaNoWriMo and a half words behind which is a tall order any month but I know I can at least put a serious dent in that before May, especially once this big work project lets up.

It’s actually a bit like coming back from vacation and trying to catch up on everything while getting adjusted to your life again. The irony of this all is that it was a vacation that got me in this mess in the first place since I picked up pertussis while on vacation in FL. I need a vacation to recover from (the horrible disease I got while on) my vacation.

My mother was ranting angrily at whatever anonymous tourist gave me whooping cough. I pointed out that I had pink eye for the whole week I was down there and didn’t know so I probably infected at least half a dozen people with it if that made her feel any better. She did not consider pink eye for whooping cough to be a fair trade and remained un-consoled.