All winter i’d been tired. Tired and logey and crabby and inert. And unmotivated. And lazy. And headachy.
A few times I tried to make an assessment of the situation. While I am usually all those things and more, I seemed to be all those things to a much higher degree than before. I went through the possible options, what had changed, what needed to be changed, what secret attacks might have been set against me.
I came to 2 conclusions

1. Carbon monoxide poisoning in really really low levels. Not the kind that just kills you but the kind that just makes you stupid and lazy and irritable and crabby and dumb.
2. I am a bad person. I find that the older I get the harder I am on myself about being lazy or crabby or inert. I just started assuming I was in an infinite loop of lazy because I am bad because I am lazy because I am bad.

Last week the headache got terrible and I had to put my “SHHHHHHHH” sign on my desk to keep people quiet. Slowly, through the fog, a pinprick of light scratched at me. Had I noticed that my nose had been gummy and problematic? Did I not think that was peculiar since my nose is generally unproblematic to the point of being forgotten? Had it not occurred to me that my nose had been gummy and problematic for a couple months now? Isn’t that weird?
Hmmmm, my nose is almost never gummy and problematic unless I am sick…..oh…the headache pain is all around my eyes….specifically in those places where my sinuses create voids…OH! OH!!!!! I see. Call the doctor’s office, surprise the lady on the appointment line by being polite (okay, fuckers, if I can surprise the appointment desk lady by saying “it’s cool, I’m sure you guys have been super busy with all the colds going around” then that means the rest of you have been assholes. Knock it off, jackasses. Don’t be mean to people who are working to help you.) and I get in that day (see! it doesn’t take much to be polite! and then you can get in!).
Yep, looks like I’d been carrying a low grade sinus infection for most of the winter and not noticed. It wasn’t one of those terrible sinus infections where you can feel your skull cracking open, just a little one. It was enough to make me tired all the goddammed time though. And crabby and headachy and lazy and all of those things I always hate about myself. There are times I wish I was OCD because then I would have a clean house and not be lazy.
But then I read Dooce and I realize that after house breaking two puppies and dealing with a really really anxious dog that would shit toxic waste every time I left the house, that maybe I should start listening to the harder side of OCD. Like the fact that I rarely get upset about the dog pee when it happened. Just hit it hard with Nature’s Miracle and OxyClean and pretend it never happened. I mean it’s not that I didn’t clean it up every time, because ew. It’s just that once it was sponged up it was forgotten (well, except the maddie anxiety shits, you don’t really forget something like that no matter how much bleach you Neti Pot into your forehead!
Speaking of pouring water into a place that I aggressively seek to keep water free…I somehow got wrangled into a “let’s try a neti pot this weekend” pact. Now I have to go get one. and put salt and water in there, and try not to think about the 9th grade biology class where we put dinoflagellates in saline solution and euglenids in distilled water. The ones in the distilled water blew all the fuck up, they kept absorbing and absorbing until they exploded. The ones in saline got all shriveled up. And that was the day we learned about relative pressure and the nature of cells and the things that go on you when you go in lakes. All I’m saying is that I’m afraid that I will put too much salt in the water and end up shriveling the cells in my sinuses…or worse, freaking out about the amount of salt, not adding enough and throwing the pressure balance off the other way.
My body has the salinity of the ocean. My kidneys maintain that balance by regulating the amount of fresh water and salt you are allowed to keep in there. My pee is the stuff that would make my cells explode if I didn’t expel it.
I once made a powerpoint presentation about the evolution of kidneys and how they allowed fish to leave the oceans and swim into less and less brackish water. (or, how swimming in the brackish=>fresh water over generations allowed those fish with the abilities to regulate their internal pressures were able to survive to continue breeding).