The Thanksgiving Report - Part 1

So, the story of my Thanksgiving starts last Monday, when I woke up with something of a "tickle" in my throat. That's precisely how you do NOT want to start a short, holiday week, but it is the hand I was dealt. As I got up and began to get ready for my day, it was confirmed, I definitely had a raw throat that was the result of sinus drainage. I do have allergies, but this seemed like pretty much the wrong time of year for those, so I figured I was probably on the verge of a cold.

This was confirmed when I woke up Tuesday morning, so I cancelled a planned early morning 2 mile run. However, I really didn't feel THAT bad. I felt worse when I got to work, and took some medicine in the morning. By the afternoon, everything had dropped down out of my head into my nose, and I was sounding terrible, but actually feeling a bit better. I was encouraged by this - as a general rule, the worse I sound the better I feel when I'm dealing with a cold. I don't know if that's a universal rule, but it pretty much works for me. I didn't have a fever, and so in the evening I was feeling well enough to attend my first Thanksgiving dinner of the week - with the young adults at my church. I have to say, very high quality meal, although the dessert portion of the event did not measure up to the "real" Thanksiving dinner on Thursay (that's not, however, an insult to the Tuesday night dessert, just wait) As expected, I was feeling a little bit worse off after being out and socializing, but still not too bad when I got home. I didn't take any cold medicine to go to bed.

That was my first in a series of mistakes. I had a miserable first part of the night until I gave in and drank some NyQuill at about 1:30 AM. Morning, of course, came too soon, and I was feeling worse than I had felt the night before. After batting around what I wanted to do in my head, I called in sick to work. I was meeting with my pastor in the morning, so I was going to be late anyhow, and thought I'd probably need to leave early since I was planning on heading home that night and hadn't done any packing yet, so that made the decision a little easier.

After meeting with my pastor (he came to me), I began the remaining series of mistakes - all of which, like the first one, fell into the category of me just not taking my illness seriously enough. I had been convinced since Tuesday afternoon that I was on the downside, and perhaps I would have been - had I taken better care of myself. When I'm seriously fighting something, I'm almost obsessive about making sure I take in plenty of fluids, and I had been so all day on Tuesday. Wednesday, however, was a different story, and after some OJ with breakfast, I really didn't drink anything for the rest of the morning and early afternoon.

Nor did I do a I particularly good job of resting. I tried to get some packing done as I felt like it, and spent a lot of time watching TV in the basement, with a space heater running right at me to make up for the sometimes drafty nature of that room. Not the best move when sick, apparently. Whatever the combination of factors that led me to it, by early afternoon, as I thought I would make the push to pack the car and drive home, I was pretty much laid out, with a fever now pushing 101. I called my Mom and told her I would likely not be home yet that evening. After that, I did what I should have done about 6 hours earlier - drank down a couple bottles of water, took a shot of NyQuill, and climbed into bed for a long nap.

I awoke several hours later, feeling much better, though still sick, and feeling really stupid for having not taken care of myself better the previous night and earlier that day. I was also much more optimistic than I had been earlier about whether I would be able to make the trip home the next morning. At that point, if I had had to, I probably could have made the drive that night, and I figured given a good night's sleep, I was only likely to feel better first thing in the morning, even if that would fade.

And I was right, I did feel even better in the morning, though I was hacking and coughing and sounded even worse, which falls right in line with the principle I laid out earlier. I loaded up the car and Chaser and I made the drive to the folks.