This cold is weirdly accelerated. The symptoms are more severe, and have rather longer periods of overlap (normally one symptom fades out as the next fades in), but overall it seems to be going by faster.
At first, this seemed like a good deal. Yeah, Day 2 in particular was pretty miserable, but on Day 3 I already felt like I’d turned the corner. It’s Day 4 now, and I feel the way I normally would around Day 6. My appetite isn’t up to par, but my body generally isn’t resisting me anymore when I try to get it to eat, and occasionally I even feel hungry. My sense of taste is still a bit distorted, but I can mostly taste things now. My normal level of executive function has more or less returned. The tiredness still feels mostly hollow, and I certainly don’t feel the way I ought to feel after getting ~4 – 5 hours of sleep the night before, but it isn’t completely hollow.
Turns out there’s an additional price I didn’t foresee, though it’s sort of mentioned in that list:
If your coughing is accelerated such that you are having 1 – 4 bouts of coughing per 2 minutes, you cannot sleep. Every time you start to even sort of settle in, another cough wakes you up. I spent three straight hours (3 – 6 AM) lying in bed, trying to find stimuli that would distract me from the urge to cough but not distract me from sleeping. (I considered taking dimenhydrinate, but given that I was already on pseudoephedrine and dextromethorphan*, I didn’t want to add another drug into the mix without having a chance to look into their interactions. Maybe tonight.)
(In the end, I don’t think anything I did worked: the coughing just sort of stopped for a while around 6 AM, enough that I was able to get another ~3 hours of sleep in.)
Given the choice of this symptom profile or the normal one, I might still go with this one, but it’s less obvious a choice than it was yesterday.
*I thought “reduces the urge to cough” meant “reduces frequency of urge to cough”, but last night’s experience was actually “reduces severity of urge to cough, such that it’s easier to ignore if you have things to take your mind off it”.
Tags:
#”get well soon” indeed #oh look an original post #Brin talks about herself for no particular reason #illness tw #disordered eating?
Brinens and Things 