Sick Sick Sick

When you wake up, you're supposed to feel refreshed and energized. Not suddenly weak and worse off before you slept.

That was pretty how much I felt yesterday. I was planning to go to the bookstore but after taking a bath and changing my clothes, my body didn't feel up to it. I went through two boxes of tissues. I was breathing through one nostril. My upper lip was numb from all the wiped-off snot. There was an imbalance in the pressure in my ears, if not actual pain. I was suffering from partial vertigo.

A simple cold did all that to me. I think many people underestimate the network that is nose-ears-throat and how the malfunction of one affects the entire body (vertigo for example can be caused by deficiency in the ears).

As a kid, such "attacks" were frequent, or at least memory tells me so. Neither Western medicine (I had weekly injections at the hospital) nor Eastern medicine (I'm supposed to drink cockroaches?) helped. It was a combination of crappy genes (every day, I hear my dad--and I'm in the other room--go to the bathroom and cough out huge amounts of phlegm), horrible bone structure of the nose (the doctor once asked if I got punched in the nose but at seven years old, I was not prone to fighting), an allergy to cold antibiotics (oh great, the only thing worse than the disease is the cure...literally), and living in one of the most polluted cities (not to drive tourists away but Metro Manila isn't the destination you want to visit for fresh air... we have the provinces and beaches for that).

Like a literary objective correlative, I started getting better when I rebelled against my parents: I moved out of my parent's room (despite the gates and the locks at the house, my parents were too over-protective that they wanted to keep me in their room), started walking home from school (it's too dangerous--it's not you we don't trust, it's everyone else), and ditched all the drugs.

Anyway, it looks like I've recovered now. Still breathing through one nostril but I think I'm healthy enough to inflict myself to the rest of the world. I expect I'll suffer the same symptoms again in two months or so (hopefully longer).