Red Letter Day

For the last few weeks I have been bogged down by a sinus infection. The kind of sickness that feels like your eyes are trying to escape your body by sheer force of will and you don’t understand how your body is still producing mucus. I was super foggy during it all, as a side effect of feeling like I had the plague.

Examples of said fogginess:

-          Talking with the doctor after he expressed concern that I had circled ‘shortness of breath’ as one of my symptoms – “Oh no, I meant shortness of breath like, when I walk upstairs I can’t breathe through the snot and it makes me want to rip my own face off. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be alarming with my circling.”

-          Thirty minutes later to the pharmacist – “Yes, I need the medication that will un-inflame my face and that I have to show you my I.D. for so you can make sure I don’t do meth.” (Sudafed was the answer we were looking for).

-          Standing at my car trying to unlock it for ten minutes, only to realize it isn’t my car. The realization came after the actual owner of the car pityingly told me it was hers.

-          Tripping every few steps because walking is apparently one of the hardest things I do all day.

You get the picture. It wasn’t pretty. Luckily, over the last week things have been on the uphill – hizzah! (I figured this blog needs regular hizzahs to keep things interesting). By this weekend I felt back to 100%. So imagine my surprise when all afternoon I was a walking mess.

Examples of said embarrassing events with no excuse whatsoever:

-          I noticed at about three, after John pointed it out to me, that I had spilled tea all down the front of me. I had no recollection of this event at all.

-          At the annual liter sale (where I buy all my shampoo for the whole year in one swoop) – I was holding four bottles of hair care products when the sales lady said I could leave them on the counter. I was hugely relieved because my arms were wicked tired. I then dropped them all on the ground. Apparently, my brain thought “put on counter” meant “LET GO NOW!” We all stared at the bottles and all I could say was, “huh. I have absolutely no explanation for what just happened.”

-          Went to a store to buy a dress for an upcoming wedding and smacked into the wrong side of a sliding glass door. Really hard – I was very committed to walking through that door.

-          And finally, walking back out of the store I decided at the last second to not go through the automatic door again since it had ended poorly for me earlier, whipped around, and slammed into the giant anti-theft screen thingies.

Moral of the story: don’t stand near me. I’ll probably run you over with my car or accidentally tar and feather you.