Though I had a cold, I was going strong on Monday. I did seven loads of laundry and accomplished a ton on my work to-do list. On Monday night, the little angel ended up in my bed coughing in my ear from 3-6 am. On Tuesday, her cold peaked, and I kept her home from school. On Tuesday night, I finished the second draft of PARKER CLEAVES despite the onset of a sinus headache. On Wednesday, I was sick but not too sick to go for a jog at lunchtime. I thought I might be able to ride out this cold like I have the last few.

On Wednesday night, I took a turn for the worse.

Yesterday was rotten. I worked from the couch. 

This morning, I got the little angel on the bus, emailed my co-workers, and went back to bed. 

My house is filthy. We didn't clean last weekend because of Thanksgiving travel, and then we put up the Christmas tree and scattered glitter and fake pine needles all over everything. Then Beloved went on a business trip on Monday and between being sick and being alone with a cat determined to knock everything off the counters and a kid trailing snotty kleenexes in her wake, I was in survival mode. 

Today, I'm having to admit defeat. I can't clean. I can't work out. I can barely function. I'm in my pajamas hammering away at my to-do list as best I can.

In the past, I might've forced myself to rally and do what I'd planned to do, anyway. That just keeps me sick longer, though. I really want to kick this cold and get on with my life. So I'm going to stay in my pajamas looking like death warmed over and move back to the couch and shut my eyes to the grime and the running shoes and the ironing piled on the dining room table. Sometimes taking care of yourself can be really hard to prioritize, but I'm really going to try, and then maybe next week I can take the world by storm.

On Sunday night, I developed a pounding headache. Maybe it wasn't pounding so much as squeezing, viselike squeezing, perhaps powered by Bank of America. My sinuses had become enflamed ripe  peaches wishing to explode. My forehead demanded pressure, but it couldn't be finger pressure because finger pressure is not equal all over. I needed perfectly calibrated pressure that could apply counterpressure to the peaches. It took Advil, a cold compress and cold on the base of my neck and about forty minutes of writhing in pain on the couch for my headache to subside back to just ripe peaches, less enflamed.

I am not a headache person usually. My mom and sister get migraines, but I usually don't. So I was really scared of making that killer headache come back yesterday morning when I sat down at my laptop and the backlight was brighter than Venus. I tried to focus on the little black marks that seemed to be some sort of language and the ripe peaches that were my sinuses raised their arms to begin conducting a sonata of revenge across my forehead. I whimpered and my co-workers told me to LEAVE, and for the first time since I started working at BlogHer, I do believe, I took a sick day. A whole one.

I slept the twitching, back-spasming sleep of the very ill on and off all day on the couch. When the little angel got home, I explained that I was dying and we would be eating mac and cheese on the couch while watching Cake Boss instead of sitting up on the Wooden Chairs of Doom at the kitchen table. Anything made of wood hurt my body, I explained, and my ripe peaches were having none of that vertical business. She immediately understood.

We got through the bath part and the books part and then she fell asleep while I reclined on her bed and tried to get up the mental and physical energy to go back downstairs. Somehow I did, and Beloved came home, and I went to bed thinking it would be impossible for me to sleep through the night after all that sleeping, but I think I might take up sleeping as my new full-time job, for I am so good at it. I slept all night long and probably could go back to sleep right now if I wanted to, but I don't want to because there are these black and white marks on my computer that I can now identify as words. I think there might be something I'm supposed to do with the words, and I'm fine with that as long as they don't make my head hurt.

I do think today will be filled with blankets and pillows and other Soft Things, though, and fuck those wooden chairs.