Scattered Thoughts . . .

Today is Saturday at the end of a week that has kept both of us struggling with the flu.  The flu still holds a tight grip on both of us and we're still feeling quite lousy.   Sheila's worst day was yesterday, particularly last night.  She had uncontrollable coughing fits for a few hours last night.  We threw a bunch of extra medications at this problem and that seemed to settle her down after another hour or so.  Today, all her muscles from her abs to her upper back are sore from the coughing fits.  She's still struggling with sinus pain, a headache and runny nose.   I'm still struggling with a relentless headache, some sinus pain, coughing and diarrhea.  The worst symptoms are the headache and especially the diarrhea.  Sheila never got the gastrointestinal problems like I did but I could have been dealing with this due to my systemic mastocytosis.  Unfortunately, this is one of my usual symptoms so I deal with this very often...

I've been sick with the flu all week and Sheila is one day behind me in her symptoms.  It has been a brutal week and I'm still feeling miserable. I can't sleep because the cold medications don't stop the itching, burning, runny nose.  The persistent cough is brutal too.  My eyes are watery and burning.  I have waves of violent shivering, fever and nausea.  I haven't eaten much this week and yet I've spent a lot of time in the bathroom sick as a dog.  Every part of my body is in pain but especially my sinuses.  Sneezing and coughing hurts in the center of my chest.  The itching, burning and runny nose is relentless and brutal though.  Worse yet, the cold medications can't seem to knock any of this down enough to get some much-needed rest and sleep. I'm exhausted...  I'm weak...  I'm in significant pain...  this week has been bordering on unbearable.  

W e finally had our family Christmas celebration at our house over this past weekend.  We had to reschedule it because Sheila and I had COVID from before Christmas and well into January.  Unfortunately, almost every one of us who attended this last Christmas party at our house is now sick with a terrible case of the flu.  My guess is that every single one of us will be sick within another couple of days.   I feel miserable.  I felt rather lousy yesterday too but, by last night, I was feeling pretty miserable.  Now I'd say I'm feeling overwhelmingly miserable.  Sheila is about a half day or a full day behind me.   I'm not sure which is worse...  the flu or COVID...  COVID lasts forever and it's still quite painful but this flu is brutal at this point.  Everything hurts.  I have chest congestion.  I have a massive headache.  I have a painful sore throat.  My sinuses are burning.  I'm dizzy, nauseate...

I haven't been writing much lately and I know that most people think that no news is good news.  That sentiment, however, is completely wrong in most cases.  We really have nothing but lousy news about lousy health to report.  I'm still knocked down with a miserable cold of some sort.  I feel quite lousy and because my body is fighting off a cold, it is making my mast cells even more active.  The mast cell disease causes my mast cells to be overactive already so adding more over-activity due to a cold makes my primary illness a bit worse.  I find myself seesawing between extra medications for my mast cell disease and extra medications for the annoying cold. All this sickness nonsense started sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  I think it was a cold at that point.  Then, sometime in January it sort of progressed into a flu bug with lymph nodes swollen and painful, exhaustion, bone and joint pain, and all the typical cold and flu sym...

I'm still struggling to shake free from the flu.  I've been sick since just before we arrived back home from our cross country rail journey.   I still have a cough but not nearly as bad as it was in that first week. My biggest complaint, however, is dealing with the overwhelming fatigue and overall aches and pains.  Then, add in the usual fatigue, bone pain and joint pain from my primary illness and the past few weeks have been brutal.  An hour after getting out of bed in the morning, I need to lay down again.  At that point each day, I hardly have the energy to stand or hold my head up.   We'll see how long this lasts...  I'm tired of it though...

This has been an absolutely brutal Christmas week so we have postponed Christmas until... well...  until things improve significantly. I haven't even written lately because my own health has been that poor.  I've still been trying to recover from a disastrous attempt at a colonoscopy in early September. It has been a terrible few months as far as my health goes so I have not written here in the blog nearly as often as I normally do.  Sheila is still struggling with terrible side effects of her cancer treatment.  Sleep is difficult for her for various reasons including pain, headaches and night sweats.  The sleep deprivation takes its toll on everything. On top of all that, she's even been trying to shake a nasty cold for the past two weeks. While Sheila has been trying to shake her cold, I developed her cold a few days ago and a nasty cold it is. No amount of cold medications have been able to even slow it down a little bit. I was up all through the nig...

My health has been quite lousy since January. Sheila and I seem to be passing a cold and a stomach bug back and forth between us, over and over. These types of 'common colds' always send my mast cells into a hyperactive tailspin so I'm having great difficulty focusing on anything because my thought processes are a muddled mess! I have a dozen different projects bouncing around in my head all at once. Most of these projects I actually want to accomplish... some I  need to accomplish as soon as I am feeling well enough... and all of these projects are occupying my thoughts at any given moment. If I'm not struggling with nausea and spending time in the bathroom, I'm struggling with pain and overwhelming fatigue. Sheila hasn't been much better lately. I feel as though I am spending all my time in bed, sleeping away the winter as projects keep backing up and my to-do list gets longer and longer. My spinal injuries are terribly inflamed. I assume much of t...