Home at last

I finally have the time to do a blog entry! w00t!

It’s been a tense week. Having a weekend during which I did no homework was surprisingly debilitating to my school life. If I was better at this whole adulting thing, I suppose I would have made sure to get far enough ahead in my schoolwork before V-con so that the time off would have been no big deal.

But that is levels and levels beyond my meager coping skills, and so instead, I had a stressful week where every night, I only had time to get the next day’s homework done. I hadn’t even played my current video game until after I finished today’s work.

And what is really complicating matters is that I keep getting sick, and I am starting to get pretty worried about that.

I missed a class today because I was quite ill. I woke up in the morning and felt absolutely wretched. I felt weak and drained and I was quite incoherent to boot. Could not concentrate. And I had this feeling like I had been pressed between two plates of glass like a specimen uynder a microscope.

I went through the motions of getting ready but when it came time to actually leave, I knew there was absolutely no way I could do it.  The thought of opening the door to leave seemed crazy, let alone actually leaving and having to cope with the world.

And the really fucked up thing is that here I am, twelve hours later, and I still have not fully recovered. This leads me to believe that I genuinely have some kind of nasty bug and it’s not just that I woke up with a low blood O2 amount due to sleep apnea.

Gee, if there was only some sort of machine that could help me with that.

Last Monday I was sick with con crud, too. So I only made it to school three out of the five days. As an academic worry, that’s troubling. But as a health worry, that’s very disturbing.

I went a long long time without missing a day of school, and yet lately, I have missed one or more days of the last three weeks or so. I think something must be messing with my immune system. Either that, or there is something wrong on a deeper level.

I’d rather it was an immune thing. That, I know how to fix.

Because the number one compromiser of my immune system is high blood sugar. And I have been very, very naughty lately. So I can see myself adding some extra insulin to my routine and seeing if that makes me feel better.

I also feel like my pores might be clogged, so a long hot shower or bath would probably do me a lot of good. Bad stuff happens when our bodies can’t cool itself properly. We mammals produce a lot of heat. Every cell in our bodies produces heat as a byproduct of metabolism. That’s how it is we can be warm-blooded creatures who are always at the right temperature for maximum metabolic efficiency.

That is, if everything is working right.

Of course, the physical distress brings with it a fair bit of emotional depression. I don’t feel very good about life right now and part of me wants to just curl up in bed with a book and tune out reality entirely by sleeping as much as I possibly can.

What keeps me from doing so is the swift and certain knowledge that such a course of action would only lead to me feeling a lot worse.

And that’s a kind of maturity, I suppose.

Still, I am going to have to keep myself busy, because when I feel like this, the worst time is always the time when my energy returns but it’s blocked by the illness and I end up in a hellish condition where those two forces go to war and I feel trapped and crazed and ready to snap in a million directions at once.

So this weekend will be a time for getting better and staying busy. Right now, my homework status is “current”, inasmuch as I have done all my currently pressing work. That makes it a great time for me to throw myself into getting ahead on my work so I can reduce my stress levels considerably.

Less stress also leads to better health.

It’s day like these which make me wish I could just press a button and my body would purge itself of all the toxins plaguing it. Flush itself out. It would be intense, possibly even hellish, but at least I would feel a lot better afterward.

Sounds like the sort of thing one does in the shower for ease of cleanup.

That’s why I have never poo-poo’d various “detox” products. A scientific case can be made for flushing out your system now and then in order to rid it of the stuff that the body doesn’t know how to handle and thus it just accumulates in our system.

But more than that,  I can understand the impulse. I often feel quite toxic. Like I am so polluted that I have become poisonous to myself and others, and only some kind of deep purification can possibly save the world from me no matter how good my intentions might be or how distressing I am finding it to hurt others.

How much of that is psychological and how much of it is  physiological I could not say.  The two interact on too intimate a level for me to be able to examine. The possibility of psychosomatic illness has haunted me ever since I was a little kid who was so anxious about having to go to school that he would try to make himself genuinely sick so that he would not have to go.

That could be construed as a red flag of sorts. But nobody was looking. Nobody was trying to put the pieces together. Nobody thought I was worth figuring out.

As you can see, I am not merely toxic.

I’m also bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.