nepaliketi

You know what? Sometimes you just got to feel like the shits so you wake up happy to be alive and kicking. Alive and kicking. I never got that. Always imagined they meant it as babies are born kicking, but after this past week (or two) of feeling like the shits after so very long I have found a new love for the phrase alive and kicking.

I realized early on in life, about two years to be precise, that sometimes you go through the lows – no, not to appreciate the highs – but to delight in the normal/mediocre/daily. Take work. You know how bored you get with the doldrums of daily tasks and then suddenly disaster strikes and it’s only when the crisis is over that you find yourself smiling at the prospect of boring old work.

Anyway, a week or so ago I woke up one day and felt like it was end of the world.

Fine, it wasn’t that bad. But, it was pretty close. I was absolutely knocked out. You know how you get the wind knocked out of you, I was just knocked out (no, not that way you with your one track mind). I just felt absolutely gutted. Since I don’t have a job or school or obligation or any real like grown up responsibility to attend to it took a day or so for my family to notice.

My family, if you didn’t know, are a bunch of a busybodies. Everyone has like at least one job (most have 2) and then a million side projects. We believe in hard work and not wasting a minute of the day (yes, we do work email while on the pot). Of course, that “we” is being used very generously here as I’m not really included in it anymore. So, rather they all get up at like 7AM (which is unheard of if you live in my world), rush to the bathroom, gobble breakfast (and a fistful of meds) and are out the door by 7:30AM.

Since I usually sleep in till … erm, noneedtonametheexacthour they usually come in one by one pat my head as I drool on my pillow and lock the door behind the them. Sometimes I also happen to be taking my siesta when they get back from work. Usually I am up at about 4AM, very alert, very jagar chaleko and on my computer and hence they have come to expect me snoring when they are working. All to say it isn’t their fault they didn’t notice right away. And I don’t mind.

When you are that gutted, it turns out, nothing really matters. My memory is hazy but I probably slept like two days straight. I was coughing up buckets of phlegm. I have never coughed so much in my life – after a day my stomach muscles were getting a work out and then by the end of it my lower back was in pain each time I coughed out some of that delicious stuff. It was disgusting (but the phlegm was white, not yellow-green so not as flavorful as it could have been). When my family picked up on the fact that no one had eaten last night’s leftovers – that’s usually my job, to finish up for my lunch-at-home whatever we didn’t the night before – they realized I must be sick.

Now I’m hardly sick. I get the cold every now and then but I’ve got so much energy it hardly stops me. I never get headaches and don’t know what period cramps are like. I am virtually sick-free. But, you know, every once in a while it’s healthy to get sick.

Finally, after three days of sleeping all day my parents grew concerned and decided we must get to the doctor’s right away. I did, yes, go in my pajamas and having not showered in well over socially acceptable number of days, tried to care, but just couldn’t.

He gave me cough syrup, a certain type of cetamol (not all is good he wisely claimed) and antibiotics. Now, if you are like me, you have a serious aversion to the world antibiotics. That aversion is of course slightly baseless as all you know is one must not consume too much antibiotics but not much more so I was a bit reluctant. Then again, remember how I said you don’t care about anything very much when you’re that sick? Yeah. I also reasoned the last time I took them I was a junior in college, so had to be about 2007 and I had to take them because I grazed my knees so very bad (right through the jeans) when I tried to walk in heels one fine day and tripped on nothing but myself. How does one graze one’s knees that bad by oneself, you ask? Well, clearly you haven’t met me.

Anyway, four days later and voila – I am feeling pretty much just all around awesome. So awesome, I had to get back from seeing the doctor this morning and blog about it. Yes, I’m a blogoholic. I don’t know why I care to publicly detail every non-significant overwhelmingly mundane facts of my life, but I do. It’s not the toomuchtimeinmyhands or that my other option is to twiddle my thumb, no sir-ee!

So, here you are ladies and gentleman a happy and smiling Nepaliketi. 745 words I hope you got my point – sometimes it takes getting really really sick (okay, so I wasn’t deathly sick) to appreciate your good old health.

Granted I don’t have my good old health at this very moment. Indeed, the doc prescribed me a second round of antibiotics and I had to take a picture becaue I very well laughed at out loud when the pharmacists pulled these babies out:

how frigheningly large do the pills have to be? there's two of 'em in one capsule but still, how does one swallow that??

Also, the initial x-ray suggested bronchitis so I googled bronchitis and ready everything Mayo Clinic had to say on it – both acute and chronic but turns out it’s not bronchitis. Just our friendly family doctor, namely non-medical school certified sister’s boyfriend who skimmed the report and had somehow suggested to my mom it was bronchitis. Of course, she came home and said “You have asthma” initially which was alarming because I’m a runner and asthma and running don’t exactly go well together. Turns out it was the Bronchitis it wasn’t. Yes, you read that right. The doc declared it was Pneumonia that I had. Who even gets that anymore? (My sister wisely pointed out I must be thinking of the Bubonic Plague.)

This is a sad day for my family of public health specialists – everyone from my parents to my cousins to my aunts and uncles are doctors, pharamacologits, rural health administrators, nurses and the like. You’d think growing up surrounded by the likes you’d know Pneumonia still existed. Ah, I never fail to impress, that I do.