Alert readers will notice I have been absent for this blog for some days. No, I did not leave it for a huskier, more masculine blog: nor did I rush away to commit seppuku after failing to complete my Challenge. It was worse than that.
Whether the swine flu finally caught up with me or I inadvertently consumed a gallon of ebola-infested suppurating roadkill, I do not know. Maybe I was just plain smote. At any rate I have spent the past three days in hellish misery - the likes of which, save for childbirth, I have never endured before. The kind of sickness where you lie in bed uncontrollably shivering and wanting to cry tears of weakness and despair, except a small desolate part of you can’t summon the oomph. The kind of sickness where even as your lips crack and bleed with dehydration, the thought of a sip of water makes your stomach revolt. The kind of sickness where about two hours in you start to think “Enough already! I get the point!” but it doesn’t stop, and you start to look longingly back on your healthy days wondering why you did not sacrifice goats every morning in gratitude for a watertight digestive system and bones that didn’t vibrate. The kind that makes you curl into a hollow ball of nihilism when your snortlepig (having just learned to climb onto the bed unaided) rouses you from a feverish sleep in order to have the milks for the eighteenth time that hour, and in the process sits on your head. The kind, I might add, that makes you wish to sue for divorce when your husband decides to leave the baby with you all evening in order to attend an extra-long practice with his marvy young vocal collective, may their larynxes swell to the size of gophers.
Speak to me not of thumbscrews and boilings in hot oil: few have suffered as I have. And I am known for my staunchness, truly. (No, really. Ask my midwife. According to her I didn’t scream at all, just made “a few slight groans”. That’s not how I remember it, but I attribute it to the whole forgetting-the-pains-of-childbirth gene mutating in myself to a forgetting-one’s-own-staunchness gene. Must be it. Did I bring up childbirth again? Sorry. I’ve spent the last three days in company of a hot wheatie bag, and the smell brings back memories. I hope my sister-in-law doesn’t read this blog, incidentally: she’s 40+5 as we speak. Sister-in-law, if you are reading this blog, pay no heed. Labour is like a fun-filled walk in a magical forest where the trees grow caramels. K? But don’t have the baby for a few days yet, I’m probably still infectious.)
I might also be a tad delirious. Anyhoo. To be strictly accurate, I didn’t spend today in hellish misery. Today I mostly lay in bed reading the end of a Terry Pratchett and an entire Maeve Binchy, which was well-written but depressing. Yesterday was the hellish-misery day, and even then, the morning wasn’t too bad. See, Mum had been planning to take me to a craft fair, and such is my devotion to Fibre Arts that I struggled out of bed and went. It was good, even if the fabrics seemed more psychedelic to me than to the average viewer. I spent a hefty chunk of my Points money on cream, pink and green dusky vintage-type cottons and flannels to make quilts for the snortlepig - better yet, I still liked them when I looked at them this morning with less bleary eyes.
Anyway. I’m looking up cheerleading stunts on YouTube. I’m not sure why, but it’s impressive.
AprilElf Says:
:( 