Flu Not Letting Up This Time

It is almost midnight on Tuesday night and I have been coughing for almost an hour straight.  Thankfully things seem to be calming down now.

This version of the flu arrived on Saturday afternoon.  Not long after I had started preparing to make peach jam to put up on the channel.

By the end of Saturday it was pretty obvious that I had caught something that was considerably more than a sniffle and would need to take care and rest.  I certainly did that on Saturday evening and all day Sunday.  Even going so far as to have a hot bath and a nap in the afternoon. 

Certainly by the time we got to 6pm on Sunday evening I thought the worst was over and tried to do a live video for the channel.  This did not do very well and after about 30 mins of trying to talk, I had to give up.  One forgets that when you are resting, you are not talking, not thinking, basically not using your faculties very much at all.  Trying to work out the live and talk for a sustained length of time, showed me I was not over this lurgy just yet.

Monday morning dawned and although my sleep had not been the best.  I headed in for work, with my flu medicine, my toilet roll (much cheaper than actual tissues) and munchies in my bag.  The effort of driving the whole 3 miles to work, was a bit more than I expected, as was the walking to the office from the car park area. 

I did try to do some works as Mandy was almost as bad as I was with the coughing and spluttering etc.  By the time we got around to about 11am, Mandy was happy to see the back of me and agreed that I should head home.  I messaged the boss to say I was going to have to go and he was as usual, the best boss ever and told me to take care and fix myself then come back. 

The remainder of Monday was spent with hot bath, nap and sitting on my armchair bouncing about on the laptop.  It was rather difficult trying to sleep as every time I went to bed and either laid down or leant back on piled up pillows, I started coughing.  I eventually gave up and came back downstairs to the sitting room and my comfy chair.  One blankie and recliner later and I managed to doze for about 10 mins.   Thankfully by about 3am I was so exhausted I managed to sleep for about an hour.  I would like to add at this time that the old wives tale of honey and lemon is to be believed and is a great comfort for a throat that has been coughed almost raw.

Tuesday dawned bright and cool which was great for the weather.  My symptoms however had not improved and it was almost an hour before I managed to sit for more than 30 seconds without coughing so much I started retching.  Patrick waited on the pharmacy opening and brought a variety of cold and flu remedies to see if any of them would alleviate my symptoms. 

It seemed that the dry cough medicine was a great idea and for the next two hours, the worst of my symptoms was some hot and cold flushes.  Then the medicine started to wear off and the coughing came back with a vengeance.  Cue immediate swallowing of cough medicine and flu capsules and we managed to get another couple of hours of peace. 

This went on throughout the day and things seemed to be improving.  So much so that at approx. 9pm I was thinking that if things kept improving the same way, I could probably do a few hours at work the next day.  Then I tried to go to bed. I headed upstairs with a dose of cough mixture and two nightime flu capsules.

I settled into bed, Raven the cat came to join me and settle on her blanket as you have seen on the short video I uploaded a few weeks ago.  That was great for all of about 5 minutes.  Then my throat started to get tickly, then I had a couple of small coughs.  Then there were more coughs and they were getting more powerful.  Then came the coughing fit which meant I had to stand up, get to the bathroom, blow my nose and try not to throw up. 

It took probably 15-20 mins to calm my system down from this.  Once I had stopped coughing and could breathe freely again, I got my extra pillows and piled them behind me.  This time I would sleep sitting up and that would stop the coughing.  It took all of 3 minutes to find out that this was not going to be the case. 

After another bout of coughing, spluttering, retching and nose blowing, I gave up.  I am now back downstairs sitting in the recliner which doesn’t seem to make me cough.  Guess I will be sleeping in the chair tonight.