Thank God it's not Monday... (bit of a rant)

Today was one of those days that I hope never to have deja vu about...

After missing both work Monday and school and work Tuesday (due to an illness I couldn't classify), I thought that I was back to normal on Wednesday. Missing the second day of class was nerve-wracking, but I managed to make it through. I had a bit of a cough, but felt generally healthy, and work that afternoon went exuberantly well.

Aglow with the special vigor that I only feel after recovering from sickness, I had a productive evening, and got to bed right on time. Tomorrow's forecast looked to be spiffily normal. Sadly, it was not to be. I struggled through school this morning, only to finally realize as I was walking to work that my problem was—I couldn't seem to breathe very well. Figuring it to be a result of my cough, I paid it no mind, and planned to work through it anyways. The fact that my sinuses were stabbing pain straight into my eyes and through to my brain...did affect my mood, but it wasn't so bad.

I started work a little early, trying to make up whatever I could of the hours I'd missed, and started to feel even more off-kilter as I was loading book boxes onto the hand truck. For some reason, I couldn't seem to get in a deep breath. I brought over the books a little slower than usual, but again paid it no mind. It wasn't until about an hour in that I realized just how tight my chest was getting, and just how difficult it was getting to breathe (all the while as my sinuses kept a rhythmic pattern of pain).

As long as I didn't move faster than a leisurely walk, and didn't lift more than two boxes within a couple minutes or list the books at my usual speed, I was fine. Which meant, that I really wasn't. I called Purring Piggy to ask for her advice, since I haven't suffered from asthma at all since I was very small. All I really wanted to do was quit early and take it easy, but I couldn't justify losing even more hours of work. So, Purring Piggy brought an inhaler. Which didn't help. Even worse, by this point, my headphones were half-dead.

(Let me pause to explain why this was no coincidence, but the universe deciding to pile yet another mess on top of my current life. Because I wear headphones around boxes and corners, they have a fairly limited lifespan because eventually they get caught on something and are damaged. I did find a pair of nice headphones on the side of the road, in a shallow puddle, back in the winter—and surprisingly, these lasted about 5 months before buzzing and dying a rather foretold death. In the meantime, I had purchased a replacement pair of headphones, expecting the road-side-rescue ones to be near death's door. These headphones? That I actually purchased? Lasted about a month, deciding to die today, when everything else was pretty much shot in my life. I don't think this is random circumstance.)

(Oh, another bit of proof that the universe decided to hate me? My Netflix disc went missing in the mail, and it happened to be the one that we really wanted to watch tonight. And it's the first time this has ever happened. I'm not making this up as some weird martyr delusion, I swear...)

So at the end of the day... I was still catching up from my missed day of school. I still needed to make up some hours of work. I had an intense sinus headache. I had a bout of asthma that was painful, unnerving, and slowing my work. And I couldn't even listen to anything soothing. There hasn't been a day that I can recall, in the near past, where I felt so utterly miserable; nothing even remotely cheery happened, and the best thing I can say is that at least Netflix has excellent customer service.

And now, after baring my (admittedly a bit whinging) soul to the five people who read this blog, which doesn't feel as cathartic as I hoped, I'm just going to go off to curl up. And not die.