Crap. I feel like crap. I'm coughing, I'm
achy, and my chest hurts. Seriously? Now? Now that the
weather is nice and the long weekend is here? Suck. Total suck.
I suffer through four days of work because we have state
testing in my subject this week, and because if I miss a day before a holiday
weekend, my pay may get docked. I barely
crawl home from work Thursday, my limbs feeling like weights, and start combing
through my medicine cabinet, where I find some meds from over a year ago that I
was prescribed the last time this happened.
Hmmmm. Expiration
date February 2015. That isn’t too long
ago.
I pop a pill.
I locate some cough syrup. I need an expectorant; I have cough suppressant. Oh, well.
Good enough for me, and, surprisingly, it hasn’t expired yet.
What truly tips me off that I’m sick is how cold I
am. Well, my face is warm, but my limbs
and body are chilled right to my bones.
Having been in the throes of extreme hot flashes for like a bazillion
months, I find this sudden freeze unsettling.
We had a cold winter, and I can tell you that most of the time I was out
there shoveling mounds of snow in a sweatshirt, sometimes without gloves,
because menopause is as close to the flames of Hell as any living creature will
ever get.
I search through the
food pantry and haul out some chicken noodle soup. All is well until I discover that the saltine
crackers have indeed expired. Yup, I
actually take a bite of one and damn-near hurl right there at the kitchen
table.
What to do, what to do.
So, I open up the bag of parmesan Goldfish crackers and
float some of them in my bowl of soup.
This works really well until the crackers start to absorb the soup. Suddenly, my once teeny Goldfish crackers
have become gluttonous koi in a soup-bowl pond.
I’ll take more meds before bed and, with any luck at all,
I’ll be sufficiently recovered to make it through work tomorrow. If not, please check to make sure that I
haven’t died from expired medication, overdosed on Robitussin, nor choked to death on parmesan koi crackers.
