It’s never fun being sick but there is an added layer of difficulty when you are sick and have other stress in your life, or other people you must tend. Winter is the time for colds, and about as soon as I moved in with Grandma and Grandpa I was dreading the first winter sniffles, and wondering how bad it would be. Every winter it seems I get at least one whopper that will lay me up for a few days, and when you’re in charge of keeping the house running a few days seriously under the weather is a luxury you really can’t afford.
I’ve suffered through two colds so far this winter. Thankfully, neither of them were very bad. Fighting off the sickness left me more tired, but didn’t put me completely out of commission. The greatest problem, as I expected, was sleeping at night.
Sleeping in the same room as Grandpa is difficult to begin with, but when my own sickness makes it even harder for me to sleep, and in greater need of sleeping . . . well, the nights can be both very long and too short. Instead of one restless occupant of the room we have two and when Grandpa isn’t keeping me awake my own miserable condition keeps me awake. Feeling poorly and very tired, helping Grandpa when he can’t figure out how to work his blankets, or how to find the bedroom door, seems like such a big project. Instead of going out to check on him when he is taking a long time to come back from the bathroom I drift back off to sleep.
I am just getting over the second cold. Oddly enough, it consisted in only a cough that developed last Wednesday. There was no sore throat, no stuffy nose . . . only the cough. But the need to cough every ten minutes makes it very hard to sleep. You lay in bed at night and you’re just about drifting to sleep when you realize you need to cough. You suppress the desire to cough and that only makes it get worse until fifteen minutes after you lay down you’re sitting up coughing violently. After being thoroughly woken up you can lay down to repeat the process again. It begins to feel like a form of torture. Once you finally get to sleep–when is it, after midnight?–you wake up every few hours with a violent coughing jag and hack up everything that was pooling in your chest for the hours you slept.
And in-between all that I wake up for Grandpa’s trips to the bathroom. Sometimes he manages the entire procedure by himself, sometimes I must help him back into bed, or lie in bed waiting for him to finish fiddling around with his bed and turn the light back off.
Morning comes to soon, and you don’t feel rested or ready to face the day.
But the cough is getting better and soon it will be gone.
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