I came back from Michelle’s memorial service with a cold that has just been impossible to kick. Family pressure finally pushed me to the doctor after about five weeks, when R refused to see The Avengers with me because he said that I’d cough too much and Dad offered to pay for the doctor’s visit and K tempted me by reminding me that doctors sometimes prescribe cough syrup with codeine in it. The doctor put me on antibiotics and from my response to them, I’d guess that I did have a sinus infection. But a week after the antibiotics ended, I’m still stuffed up, still coughing (although not nearly as badly) and still sneezing. In my non-medically trained opinion, that’s allergies.

Along the way, though, with the ferocious cough, I developed a pain in my right side. Pulled muscle, in my ever-so-competent, non-medically trained opinion. And yeah, it was weird that a month later, it still hurt to take a deep breath, but muscles are slow to heal. But yesterday, while swimming, I dived down to the bottom of the pool to try to retrieve a basketball.

If I hadn’t been underwater, I would have screamed. For a second, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it out of the pool. I spent the next hour sitting very still, waiting for the pain to stop and breathing shallowly. I actually watched the Neil Gaiman commencement speech that’s been making the rounds during that hour and when he made me laugh, I followed it up with a whimper. In my not-so-competent, non-medically-trained opinion, I have a cracked rib. This makes me want to say lots and lots and lots of bad words.

On the pain scale of 1-10, the pain used to be … maybe an inconsistent 4. In the right position, it didn’t bother me at all, but if I did something like take a deep breath, it was annoying enough to stop me in my tracks. Now, sitting perfectly still, pillow against my back, it’s a 5. When I move the wrong way, it’s about an 7. Last night, it was lie in bed and weep pain.  I suppose the only positive side is that I’m finally rewarded for not having used all the pain pills from my dental surgery of five years ago.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to whine about this on my blog. Maybe it’s because I really wanted to write a lot of A Gift of Thought today and I’m not sure that’s going to happen. But at least I can tell myself that I wrote something, even if it’s just a whine.