Quarantined....

I am ill.  Proper ill.  I sound like a consumptive Victorian street urchin.

The Lovely Husband very kindly brought back a gift of germs from fellow London commuters last week which meant I had to do a craft fair in Alresford on my own last Saturday while he got on with the business of being pale and wan at home, filling the wastebins with snotty tissues and moaning quietly to himself.

I started with the scratchy throat on Saturday night, with the tickly cough arriving on Sunday.  I made arrangements to withdraw from polite society and entered seclusion in the west wing of Jones Towers in order to keep my germs to myself.  You're welcome.  The only things I actually needed to leave the house for this week was the weekly foodshop on Monday and art class on Friday morning.  I arranged for Sainsbury's to deliver on Monday and we'd see about Friday.  Surely I'd be fine by then.

Ha.

The coughing has got worse and worse all week and has now defiantly lodged into my chest.  I lie in bed at night and listen to it, and wonder how I managed to inhale a crisp packet as my lungs fizzle and crackle away to themselves.  It's taken nearly a week for it to start streaming, which began last night.  Great.

I obviously had to dob off art class, which was this morning, as my sinuses are currently channelling Niagra Falls and I have a 1,000-a day smoker's cough.  I'm not sleeping very well so am utterly exhausted too but find I cannot nap during the day.  I don't think it's flu.  I did have a temperature back on Monday but it's fine now.  And I'm actually okay to do a few things around the house in the afternoons (I'm much worse in the mornings and evenings).  I think it's just a very nasty cold.

But even though I do a few very minor things in the afternoon, such as empty the wastebins, do a load of laundry, even change the beds a few days ago (but just one thing, I couldn't do all of them in an afternoon), I'm falling behind on things I want/need to get done, and it's frustrating.

For example, I've been doing work in the garden.  My garden is not big but I have rather been neglecting it and it's become overgrown with ivy.  So at the beginning of September I decided to do something about it and started ripping out spindly shrubs, tearing out ivy, cutting down smallish trees that were blocking light, weeding beds, planting winter bedding such as cyclamen and pansies.  And I made a good dent into it but, due to this cold, the most I've done this week is stood out on the bridge in the sunshine for a few minutes to enjoy a bit of fresh air, before coughing up a lung.  Again.

Also, at the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of running 250 miles before 31 December 2013.  So far I've run 184 which means I have 66 miles left to do in 74 days (as of today).  And I can't honestly see myself doing much running next week if this cold hangs around.

Thirdly, I've had my first painting commission (can't go into detail) but that needs to be done by Christmas.  I made a start last week and managed to draw it out and start with the background colour but then lurgy hit and I've had to just walk away from the easel for now.  I'm also supposed to be working on a project for my contemporary painting art class and I pretty much know what I want to do, but need to get a canvas the right size and just generally do more thinking about it, which my brain doesn't want to do just now.  It just wants to concentrate on producing phlegm.

And, to top it all off, my period arrived this morning.  I'm 50 years old, why can't this stop already?

So, to bide my time while this bug liquifies my insides, I've been catching up on telly programmes that we've had sitting around for far too long and working on my latest cross-stitch project, which I think I'll keep to a separate post so I can find it later!

Oh, and thank you for your kind works about Sylvester Bean.  The antibiotic injection seems to have done little to reduce his weird lump but it doesn't seem to be getting any bigger.  He doesn't seem to be distressed in any way about it and is the same as he's always been, so we're not going to worry about it. I don't want to put him through the stress and pain of medical examinations when he seems cheerful enough in himself just now.  He's obviously not suffering - he's getting about as much as his arthritis will allow, eating, drinking & pooping normally, swearing at the neighbour's cats, shouting at us all the time demanding cream and fish.  If we continue investigations, the next step will be a needle biopsy under sedation, possibly an x-ray under sedation, all to be told that it's probably a tumour (which is what the vet first suspected when we took him) which, given his age, it isn't worth operating on.  Something's going to get him.  Something's going to get all of us.  He's happy enough currently and isn't ready to go just yet so I think we'll wait until he tells us.

Onto slightly cheerier things, I do have some paintings that I've done to show you but they'll be in the next post(s).