Being Sick Sucks, But It Can Actually Do You Well!

It finally came around to bite me in the ass! All these late nights followed by long, early days, and days lasting over 24 hours have caught up with me. I never get sick. If being sick was a magazine, I cancelled my subscription. I was doing so well this whole season! My mom and aunt were sick over the holidays, a lot of my classmates were sick, my co-workers were sick, and I was immune! Totally fine! Yep, not me! I'm just swerving illness like potholes in Montreal!

This baffled me. Especially considering how little sleep I got during this time (see: http://tinyurl.com/y44hwtz9 ). What surprised me the most about this crazy, sleepless, restless lifestyle was how long my body actually managed to keep it up for! Genuinely! I'd wake up almost every day thinking, "Wow! I'm... good! More or less..." obviously, I was incredibly tired, easily irritated, a little cranky and just generally miserable, but on beat the drum, and away we go! We marched forward, and we took things on to the best of our ability!

Slowly dying... back to life?

Until it finally happened! I was betrayed by my old, long-time forgotten mistress, sleep. I woke up this past Saturday afternoon feeling shittier than usual. Yes, waking up, hating the world, cursing at literally everything while I groggily droned about putting clothes on and making sure I didn't leave the house an unhygienic mess became a norm. So I figured this time around, it would be no different! But something was up. I felt worse than normal, and I realized that I had woken up in a sweat! Like, what the hell?

Then, when I got out of bed... my HEAD! Like, woooooah! I had this intense, massive, throbbing, pressurized pain right in the upper back part of it. It felt light and heavy all at the same time. Not to mention the dizziness, and later finding out, the slight fever. It was nuts! This whole thing seemingly manifested itself inside me while I slept! No warning signs, no letters in the mail, no Facebook notifications... just, bam! You wake up, you're sick!

I didn't even believe it at first. I remember just laying down on the couch the entire day hoping this thing would go away in a couple of hours, but it only got worse! The denial was definitely real! Even worse, because of my denial, I waited too long to get a replacement for my shift that night. So, I still went to work from midnight till six am. Normally, this would be fine. Working an overnight shift, no problem. When dealing with all that though? It's something else. Thankfully I had Tylenol 3's to keep a steady amount of codeine running through my system all night. That, along with my co-workers being literally the best human beings in the world and helping me out really made things bearable!

After struggling through that entire shift, I came home and just collapsed. This time though, I knew what I was getting myself into. I realized where I was. I knew what I was dealing with. I made sure to indulge in some self-care. I took a nice, warm shower, and prepared for bed expecting to sweat all over the clothes I was wearing. I planned accordingly. It was worth it. I woke up later that day, still feeling terrible. Got my shift at work that night covered, and went into full recovery mode. Sweat it all out, lots of fluids, lots of rest. I probably fell in and out of sleep around five times that day.

Overall, being sick sucks. Let's not think any different. It limits what you can do, you simply feel awful, you're unable to think straight, you're dreadfully tired and braindead. But for me, it was actually a great means of resetting. All these outside stressors that I had, school, work, the future... will I ever move out of my mom's basement? All these thoughts, concepts, theories... brain pollutants, essentially... all of them disappeared! Mind you, I still managed to get some work done, but I focused primarily on myself. The whole time I was sick, it was just these two things! With the craziness of my schedule, I've been so tightly wound lately, that this concept of not thinking about anything but yourself, and possible getting a single assignment in the works on the side would have been an impossible concept to grasp with my resting stress level. But somehow, by being sick... this stress was gone. My main concern was resting my way out of this hellish, short term illness. So yes, it took something as physically shocking to the system as getting sick to make me realize I need a break once in a while! We all learn somehow right? We ignore signs, we stress the small stuff, we get so caught up in our day to day lives that sometimes, we fail to take some time out to care for ourselves. So (weirdly enough)... thank you, mildly debilitating weekend flu?