“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest”

…or at least that’s what the painful tightness in my chest feels like. Fortunately, I now have cough syrup with codeine, which I much prefer to “a bottle of rum.”

Oh wait; darn it, D. has just informed me that “chest” in that song refers to a treasure chest rather than one’s upper abdomen. How did I never realize that before? Okay, never mind the Robert Louis Stevenson allusion. The point is that I’ve got bronchitis, and it feels like a big weight is pressing down on my chest. Most uncomfortable. I just started antibiotics this afternoon, which I’m hoping will have me right as rain in a couple of days.

How did I get into this state? After having this cold for a full week, on Sunday night I got almost no sleep at all. I couldn’t turn off my brain after the meeting with the President, and then right as we were winding down for bed, D. started throwing up (which she kept up off and on for the next 12 hours), and then she started snoring because she was so snuffly, and then whenever I did manage to drift off I would start coughing and wake myself up. Totally exhausting night. And then in my last class of the day on Monday, I practically coughed up a lung, which is what finally convinced me to make a doctor’s appointment for this afternoon. (On the plus side, I got major sympathy from my students.)

So last night I took Theraflu, two Tylenol P.M.s, and cough syrup, and then went to bed and slept for a full eleven hours! My eyes must have been oozing while I slept, because when I woke up they were sealed shut with dried-up crustiness; yuck. All of that sleep is, I think, the only reason I kept body and soul together today, although even then I had to let my morning class out early because I temporarily lost my voice.

We also got flu shots this afternoon. It used to be that you weren’t supposed to get a vaccination if you were already sick, but my doctor cleared me for it this afternoon and said that this prohibition doesn’t really matter any more, now that they use killed-virus rather than live-virus vaccinations. So I’m sick as a dog now, but I’ve tried to take steps to avoid being much sicker than a dog later this winter. (Do dogs get sick more often than other animals? What’s up with that expression?)

And now I’ve got fabulous drugs. I was lying on the couch around 6:30, groaning with pain whenever I coughed because it hurt so badly, and D. pointed out that I had an untouched bottle of cough syrup with codeine that I wasn’t taking, and that the whole point of the codeine was as a pain reliever. Oh right, that makes sense. So I’ve now started drugging myself and will take another dose before I go to bed. (And if this blog post is totally rambling, which I think is probably the case, let’s blame it on the drugs and the pain I’m in.)

D. is doing her very best to comfort me; she’s a total sweetie. She made me the most fabulous comfort food dinner (way delicious) and then bought me a TypePad account. Yay! So update your blogrolls and syndicate feeds, please, because I’ll be heading over to the new account pretty soon. I think I’ll post on both blog sites for a week or so and then migrate over to the new account entirely.

Someone on TV just said “People getting sawed up and eaten by bears? That’s not good.” So true, so true. Hmm, perhaps I’m getting spacy. Is this what drugs feel like? Time to stop blogging, no doubt, and plan on going to bed in the near future.