Quarantine

 
I am sick. Awfully, miserably sick. I have lost a fair bit of weight. I have conjunctivitis, I have enlarged tonsils, I have blocked sinuses and last night I spiked a high fever and moving any of my muscles hurt. I can't eat, I can barely bring myself to drink. I am dehydrated and the corners of my mouth have cracked and begun bleeding. The pain mingles and makes me cry. I am intermittently boiling hot and freezing cold. Sweating but needing the doona on so that I don't freeze. Airconditioning on because I can barely breathe it's so hot.

My neck is stiff and sore, rolling over in bed hurts and my hips are starting to stick into the bed so that it feels all springs. Aspirin and paracetamol took away the fever but the eye that keeps weeping and the neck that feels like it's in a vice continue. I took the day off work today. One of my precious sick leave days and calculated that if I don't go in tomorrow, I will not get paid.

This cold probably came from work. A couple of people have been sick with viruses. But because most of my leave goes on my children, there's not much left for me. I have buckets of annual leave. Weeks worth. Not only leave but leave loading, because the assumption is that I never work 38 hours per week. But I can't access that until October. 14 months in a row of work. Stupidly long hours, being grateful if I have two days off in a row, thanking deities if they happen to be on a weekend. And I'm working myself into illness. And tomorrow I will have to have an unpaid day off, sick, violently so, and financially impacted because of it.

I am grumpy and miserable. No one likes being sick, but I feel unfairly sick. I can't use the computer much because it hurts my eyes. Holding a book last night took more energy than I could muster. I can't watch tv (even if there was anything on) and lying in bed hurts.

I took a photo today with the webcam to show my incredibly shrinking waistline and bust. It reminds me of being pregnant and not being in control of my body. It's doing its own thing and eating itself from the inside while I hover as a ghostly shell wringing my hands. I have not felt this physically miserable in some time. Even when my anxiety was bad and I was vomiting all the time, getting out into the sunshine helped, and going to work and focusing on something else helped. But now I'm at the whim of some bastard nanoparticle that is abusing the hospitality of my mucous membranes.

I'm clearly not good in hostage situations.