Today's post is a little different from my previous entry's. It's not about Autism and it's not about Mia. It's about me.
About two weeks ago, I started coughing in my sleep. I would wake up with my nasal passages locked shut with mucus. I would run in the morning but by around 9am I felt like I needed a nap. In the afternoons, my fingers began to tingle. It started as a cold.
Days went on and the cold like symptoms didn't go away. Nevertheless, my routine continued running in the morning, walking Gussie, yard work, wake Mia up, bath time, school time, Spanish lesson, clean house, pick Mia up, grocery store, make dinner and repeat. If you're anything like me once you get into a routine it's almost impossible to break yourself out of it. I felt if I didn't check every box on my daily list I was a failure.
Four days ago, I saw Mia off to school. I was sitting in the big rocking chair in my bedroom and I started coughing. I started coughing and didn't stop. I started wheezing and gasping trying to catch my breath. I couldn't. I struggled so much to inhale I ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. I realized maybe my cold wasn't just merely a cold. I looked up my symptoms and diagnosed myself with Pertessus (whooping cough). I called my Dr. and got in for a 3:45 appointment.
The nurse strapped the blood pressure sleeve around my left arm and cocked her head at the first reading. She took it again. "90/70" she said. "Is that good?" I asked. I ask this everytime because I'm used to getting a positive response. "Um" she said, "it's low for you".
When my Dr. walked into the room she told me, "I don't think you have whooping cough". "If you had whooping cough, I'd be able to hear you in the waiting room". "OK", I said. She put her stethescope on my back and asked me to take deep breaths. For the first time in my life I struggled to muster a deep breath, they were short and stilted. "Youre very tight" she said. "I think you have Pneumonia".
Before I knew how to respond, she left the room and returned with a nebulizer. I started puffing on it. My hands started shaking from the oxygen. I was excused with a stash of medication. Steroids, antibiotics and an inhaler.
I'm three days into my medicine and I feel much better. I feel like I have energy again and the coughing in my sleep is slowly going away. As an adult, I think it's easy to get into a mind set that you have to do things the same certain way every day to be productive. As a mother, it can be easy to believe you have to take care of other's before you take care of yourself. I think in the future, if I feel sick, I'm going to try to give myself a break so I can heal. It's like they teach you on the inflight safety announcements "Please put on your oxygen mask before assisting others".
