Too bad we don't get better - all of a sudden

I've been feeling bad (sick, not depressed) since New Year's Day. That's fourteen days. I'm gradually getting better but wouldn't it be nice if one day you just woke up and felt great? I find that sometimes it's hard to remember how it felt when you weren't sick. Maybe, as you get older, you just never reach the point of feeling as good as you did before you got sick. Maybe it's just all downhill once you reach a peak in your 20s or 30s. Now you see how bad I'm feeling. Maybe I am a little depressed. I'm not usually this pessimistic.

It all started around Christmas when our daughter started coughing and sneezing. She started out with a fever and was lethargic. The fever passed quickly but she was sneezing and coughing for weeks. After the first five or six days, though, we all thought we out of the woods and wouldn't get what she had. Bzzzt! Wrong. It just waited until the new year hit. As I mentioned before, my son and I tried to stay up until midnight to see the new year but only made it until 11:30 pm. I just assumed that's why I felt bad the next day. Bzzzt! Wrong again. So, I laid around the whole day, wasting one final day off. I didn't feel too bad that night and figured I'd go to work the next day. Bzzzt! Wrong yet again. I called in sick and hoped one more day off would help. It didn't.

This stupid cold was insidious. It ran in peaks and valleys - almost like the wave you see when you alternately charge and discharge a capacitor. Felt great for a few hours and then felt like crap for a few hours. Every day for fourteen days. But I could see the valleys (what I describe as feeling bad) weren't as deep each time. But the point of this whole, rambling post is that it only gradually got better. So, at the end of the fourteen days, it was hard to feel, "OK, I'm better now." It could have just been another peak; soon to be followed by another, hopefully less deep, valley. Wouldn't it be nice if you just stayed sick for as long as it took and then one day you woke up and, BING, you were better? You'd be sure you could go to work. You'd be sure you could devote the whole day to things you needed to do or fun things you wanted to do with your family. Another nice side-effect to this Feel-Better-Switch would be that you'd know if it was a good time to make a decision.

This is a thought I'll try to expand on in a later post: I try to not make any big decisions when I'm feeling sick, tired or depressed. It's amazing how many really bad decisions I've made while I'm not feeling good. And if I'd have just waited a few days (or hours or minutes :-), I would have felt better and made a better decision. More on that sometime. For now - look out, world - I'm feeling better!