Being sick sucks.

Having a ten month old who is sick sucks worse.

Being sick while you have a ten month old who is also sick bites it big time.

Being the wellest (wellest??) person among your colleagues despite all that bites big hairy dog balls.

I've been back at work since Monday, but even last week, when I didn't go out of the house for 120 hours straight, I still was working fourteen hour days from home because as sick as I was, I was only run-of-the-mill sick and three quarters of the people I work with are out with crazy, random illnesses that are undiagnosable and weird complications that hardly ever go with the sickness they've got. Which means there's no one to pick up my slack if I'm out for a couple of days. Conversely, I need to pick up the slack of others. I guess I should feel grateful for that but I'm not sure I do.

Last Wednesday, I called up a colleague who had been out for a week and a half but sick on and off for a month before that and said, "You need to get tested for lyme disease, I think you have lyme disease. Also, tell them to test you for mononucleosis." She poo-pooed the idea because her physician had done a ton of blood work already and they had tested for everything they could think of. But lyme disease was not one of them. On Friday, she called back and told me, "Hey, you were right. Turns out I have lyme disease. And while I don't have mono now, my blood work shows markers that I did have it within the last month."

Just another tick in the long list of why Dr. Google and I should be your family physician rather than a person who has actually been to medical school.

I still have a miserable cough and sound like a distressed walrus when I break into one of my fifteen minute coughing spells, but I can take drugs that suppress it enough to get through short periods of time without breaking into a hacking, mucous-y fit. In fact, I played at a funeral pretty much high last night just so I could get through the event without causing a disturbance from the podium. I hate to admit it, but I think the drugs actually helped my piano playing - or at least they loosened me up enough to do the improvising necessary when you've thrown something together at the last minute and don't have a real arrangement for the song you've been asked to do. Or maybe the drugs just got me to the point where I didn't care if I made a mistake.

Fortunately, I just finished a very long, very tedious project editing a book and now I feel like I have the luxury of actually being sick when I'm sick... just when I'm starting to feel a bit better.

Ah, irony. How I've missed you. Or is that just a bummer? I'm never sure.