Why Can't I Get Better?

Awake at 3 a.m. because the cough that had been slowly, torturously getting better throughout the week is now suddenly getting worse again. It's hard to understand why this keeps happening...moving from starting to recover back to relapsing, over and over again. My doctor gave me a prescription for a broad antibiotic with the advice to wait a few days to fill it. She didn't think what I had was bacterial and so she only wanted me to fill it if I wasn't getting better. That was a couple of weeks ago. I didn't fill it because I felt like I was getting a little better each day, even if it was at a very slow pace. (And because antibiotics are such a drag). But I guess I'll fill it tomorrow and give it a try.

I feel like I've been beat up by a gang of thugs. Specifically, a bunch of thugs who kicked me over and over again in the ribs and the back. What's worse than a never ending cough, it turns out, is a cough that conjures up a sharp punch to the ribs with every inhale. A punch delivered by Mike Tyson wearing a metal glove.

And as long as I'm bitching and moaning endlessly here, I'm also going to complain about the fact that I haven't been able to run or do any meaningful exercise in ages, which is hell on my mood, my weight management efforts, and my self esteem. I know. I'm a giant baby with this stupid cough!

Why hasn't my body been able to effectively fight this thing off? I feel like it's not working very well these days. This probably has to do with things like sleep, and rest, and the impossibility of achieving either of these objectives ever. For instance, being wide awake at 3:23 a.m. and knowing I have to get up at 7. Or never taking a day off from work. Or traveling. But as I look forward, the weekend is filled with early mornings and laundry and grocery trips and toddler herding, and the week is filled with work and more of the same, and the months stretch out without any realistic opportunity to just fucking sleep in, ever. Jake more than pulls his weight but even when he gets up with the kids, he cannot manage to get them up, dressed, and downstairs without several bouts of high-pitched screaming. Earplugs only get you so far.

I know. It always seems worse in the middle of the night. It'll seem better tomorrow. I just don't want to start another 2-week cycle of exhausting, constant, painful, sleep-disrupting coughing. It is depressing me. I am always a terrible patient -- a total wimp. I would make the worst Victorian-era malingering heroine ever.