The Common Cold in My 50+ Body

No matter how old I get, one thing that doesn't seem to change is my desire to talk to the world when I'm sick and let everyone know how bad I feel. Apparently, I keep this blog here just so I can get a few thoughts off my chest and send them out into the ether every once in a while. So here I am!.

I have just returned from my annual family vacation with an illness. This is the third year in a row that it has happened, even though I took precautions this year. I stayed out of crowded spaces and congregated only with my family group. I even wore a mask on the 10-hour van ride home because two of our group got sick (silly boys passing vapes around on the smoking deck!), yet I still caught the crud. I feel better than I did last year and I am thankful that it isnt the Big C-19, but I still don't feel great.

As I sit here sipping tea on Day 6 of this cold and trying to fight off another coughing fit, I have been thinking about how my body handled the common cold differently when I was younger. In my 20s, I rarely even took a day off if I had a cold. I would cough and sniffle and keep going. I was a bit more tired than usual, but I pushed through. For most of my life, I barely even took medicine for colds. 

Now, at 58 years old, I am thankful that I work from home because I have barely been able to drag myself out of bed the last couple of days. With this cold, I started taking medicine as soon as I felt the tiniest symptom and by the third day, I thought that perhaps I could just beat the symptoms down and get past this cold not feeling too bad. Silly me! I forgot that colds in my older body don't act the same. When I get a cold now, there always comes a point where the cough medicine no longer suppresses the cough and the hacking keeps me awake and uses up all my energy. This only lasts a couple of days, but I can't imagine trying to go in to an office and work when I can barely sit up straight and sound like I am coughing up a lung.

Another frustrating thing about this cold is the timing. Going on vacation gave me a renewed sense of purpose and desire to tackle projects and tasks that had been languishing throughout the year. Getting sick as soon as I came home and not having the energy to address those tasks was disheartening. know from past experience that it will be difficult for me to recapture that momentum once I recover from this cold. 

My Exercise Paradox

 (I spent more time than I should have, trying to figure out if "paradox" was the correct word to use in this instance. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm using it, anyway.)

One of the big symptoms of multiple sclerosis is fatigue, and the main suggestion to help manage it is to exercise regularly. Even before my diagnosis, I never was a person who got energy from exercise, even after sticking to a routine for several months. Right now, I barely have the energy to walk to the bathroom and back, so how am I supposed to exercise? 

We went on our family vacation over the Labor Day weekend, and walking through the airport nearly took me out. I did my best to keep up with everyone and not complain, but my husband ABM ended up getting me a wheelchair to get through the airport on the way back. After that experience, I told myself that I would make more of an effort to improve my fitness before the next trip. Now that I have recovered from the crud I caught on vacation, I should be ready to start an exercise routine. In reality, I don't even have the energy to keep myself fed. 

Despite the urge to lay in bed and feel sorry for myself, I will be walking in place beside my bed while I watch TV with my hubby this evening. It's not much, but I have to start somewhere, right?

Yes, I'm still around

Many events have occurred in my life and in the world at large since I last posted to this blog. I've been getting that itch to communicate for a while, so I'm back here again. I know that blogs are a bit out of style and more of a Gen X/Millenial thing, but my flirtations with Facebook and X-Twitter no longer fit my needs. I just want to cast my thoughts into the ether without wading through other people's political rants and such. If anyone wants to join me here, I welcome your comments. If I am just talking to myself, that's cool, too.

Before I pulled this blog back out of the archives, my eldest daughter talked me into resurrecting my YouTube channel. If you want to get a glimpse of what we've been doing on Friday afternoons, here's a link: https://youtube.com/live/IulbaXLV_0Q?feature=share

Prepping for a new month

A post shared by Dani (@daniinnc) on Sep 30, 2017 at 1:46pm PDT

After a week of dealing with heavy fatigue (at one point, I could barely drag myself to the kitchen for food), I woke up today and was determined to get some housecleaning done, at least to the extent that my still-limited energy level would allow. While cleaning, I realized that tomorrow is 01 Oct, and you know me -- I love making a fresh start at the beginning of the week or the month. The first of the month being on a Sunday makes it a double whammy in my mind. There is also something about autumn that says "renewal" to me, probably because (at least here in the southern US) it is starting to cool off and tackling the bigger chores is easier to envision when we are no longer having 90-degree days.

So as I'm sitting down to rest in between chores, I'm preparing for the new month in various ways:

• I'm reviewing the 30-day Foundation fitness program for beginners on HASfit. I've been doing their videos for most of September, but I fell off the wagon during the past week.
• As you may be able to tell from the photo above, I'm prepping my October calendar in my bullet journal. When I started using it in December 2016, I didn't think I had enough going on to use a bullet journal. Now that I'm juggling classes, exercise, and stitching projects, I'm starting to see how the"bujo" can be useful to me.
• I'm updating my SHE box. I stopped using it towards the end of May when I was feeling more in control of the housework. Unfortunately, that sense of being overwhelmed is creeping in again, so it is the SHE box to the rescue!

I've been exercising and using my bullet journal for over a month, which I'm taking as a good sign that I may be able to make these habits stick. Hopefully adding the SHE box into the mix isn't too much. 

Do any of you feel that sense of renewal in the fall? What do you do to make a fresh start for the month or the season?