Now That I've Been Beaten All Over With Sticks, I Guess It's Time to Go to Work

I got a stomach bug Monday morning. Or maybe Sunday evening. In any case, I have been home sick with it since 10:30 Monday. Except, perversely, it seems to have done nothing more than completely scramble my nervous system, triggering a resurgence of all the fibromyalgia symptoms which have been blessedly absent the last several months. So, I feel like my ears are filled with cotton, my eyes are not working correctly and my brain is functioning about as well as if I have been slipped maybe a quarter of a roofie with my morning coffee. I have pain which feels vaguely like someone has tried to insert a steel rod through my spinal column without anesthesia. And I hate everyone.

But, at least I didn't throw up.


Something about having had this all respond to treatment and fade into the background of my consciousness, makes feeling it all again even worse. I guess I feel like Life has betrayed me, or I am being punished for something that I want to argue I never did. If I was just barfing, that would seem fair. But the fact that some virus has entered my system, and, aside from producing indigestion, just screwed up the whole works, seems monumentally arbitrary and capricious.

Plus my poor husband is also sick, with a bad head cold that won't go away and somehow that makes me feel like I am tightrope walking with no net.

I don't really have a punchline for this.

I just want to complain in some safe way because the rest of my day will consist of trying very hard to appear as if nothing is really wrong, while doing all the things that have to be done. Not that I want everyone all day coming up to me to profess their sympathy. I don't. I just want to mark it down somewhere that it sucks having this disorder. I want to give up and go back to bed, but I am not willing to suffer the consequences of doing that today. I need show up at work, to see the kids in my reading groups, to take my oldest son to his appointment in Santa Fe, to restore a sense of normalcy to the week.

But if you want to feel sorry for me from a distance, feel free. I'd appreciate the love.