A common cold

I spent all afternoon with a client. He had a new computer which needed installing and configuring before leaving on a business trip. It was urgent so I went out and got the job done. It wasn't until the end of the day that I realised he was leaving Thursday week and not the day after tomorrow. Duh...

I started getting pretty tired by the end of the day and my neck was killing me (mostly muscular). I then spent an hour in traffic getting home at a snail's pace. By the time I got home I was exhausted. By the time dinner was finished I had coughed enough and blew my nose enough to realise this was more than usual.

I've been coughing more and more over the past few days. My nose runs pretty often, on and off, at the moment as well. My nose runs whenever I eat but that's different. Last night it was pretty often and the coughing just didn't stop. It became obvious that on top of everything else I've got a cold.

A common cold under most circumstances is not big deal. But at the moment it is incredibly painful. Every time I sneeze I scream in pain. Every time I cough I cry. When you cough a lot your throat gets irritated. When your throat is already intensely irritated coughing takes it beyond intense.

I took a big dose of paracetamol and put myself to bed, in the guest room, and slept through till 10:30 this morning. I'm actually feeling a little bit better but we'll see how I am this evening.

Desney went out and got me an amazing humidifier machine to try and help the dryness of my throat in the evening and in my office. The machine has a built-in hydrometer to stop itself when the humidity level in the room reaches the desired level; a timer to turn itself off after a certain amount of time; a few other controls allowing even more fine tuning and adjusting. Basically you need an engineer's degree just to get the thing to steam your room. I tried it out last night. It didn't seem to help much with my coughing as I still had a fit at 03:00 and another at 04:30. But it did succeed in making steaming noises throughout the night and every 10-15 minutes or so it would make a gurgling sound as it "drank" more water. I can generally sleep through anything. But I know most people would not be able to sleep with this thing... In the morning I woke up feeling as I normally did, pretty bad, but with wet windows.