Recovery

What started out as a mildly scratchy throat on Sunday night, turned into a hacking cough by Monday lunchtime which sent me home from work in a jelly-limbed stupor. I managed to stop at Boots on the way home and stock up in the manner of a Supermarket Sweep contestant with all the items I could possibly need to fight the approaching illness. Thank goodness I did because what followed was three days of the worst chest infection I've had for years. I had a temperature! Haven't felt the familiar clammy-handed sweats for a long time. I basically spent the whole week up until yesterday lunchtime languishing in my too hot/too cold bed being simultaneously searingly ill and unbelievably bored.
Today I made it into work, trailing the remnants of the infections behind me like tin cans on a wedding car. I still have a cough although I can lie flat without my lungs filling with fluid (scary) and I still have a runny nose and accompanying dry skin. One good thing that came out of all this was that I received a loud and very determined wake up call from my own lungs. As I lay in the midst of the worst of the infection on Monday night, thrashing about in frustration at my boiling skin and compressed chest, gasping and wheezing for breath between coughs, I realised what it would be like if I continue to smoke. Just like that, but probably without the temperature. The horror of it hit me harder than any of the physical symptoms did and it reduced me briefly to tears. What am I doing to myself?? I am voluntarily plotting a course towards certain death that will probably be a hundred times more excruiciating and upsetting than anything I can imagine. It's utter insanity. Of course I know the dangers, have always known them but somehow as an addict you just blind yourself to the reality. Well, I haven't smoked for 5 days and I would really love to try and stop now. I suddenly feel I owe my lungs an apology.

Needless to say I missed my date with O on Thursday although he texted me through the week and knew I wasn't well. I had two phone calls with him and we got on extremely well. He's a biology teacher with the sexiest voice I've heard in ages. He's welsh but the accent has softened after years in London and he's been left with the most delicious lilt to his voice. I'm slightly worried about the amount of contact we've had prior to our first date (which is now on Sunday) because I've been down this road before. You have call after call, you send random texts and you build them up in your mind to be the one who might just change your life. Then you meet them and realise they're most definitely not which leaves you in the delightful position of having to extricate yourself from regular contact which is hard when you've sort of let yourself get used to them. It's a lot easier if they don't like you of course. Painful but it takes the pressure off.

I'm looking forward to Sunday afternoon. Hopefully if nothing else it'll be a nice diversion from an otherwise uneventful weekend and...well..you never know, do you?