All around me friends and family have been succumbing to the joys of cold and flu season. Snuffling, sneezing, feverish and wheezing their way through the days as I have smugly taken my vitamins and bounced along, feeling just fine thank you for asking. Well, I’ve gotten my comeuppance, and now I wish I’d just gotten the flu like everyone else.

...

Instead Mother Nature dosed me with an insidious sinus infection that slowly invaded my head, stealing my ability to breathe so gradually that I didn’t actually realize I was sick. It lay in wait for weeks, taking up a comfy residence in my cranium and playing merry havoc with my immune system. It wasn’t until the past week I started to notice the need for sleep was ramping up, my energy was flagging and I had started to snore like a grizzly bear with a deviated septum. Nothing like waking yourself out of a sound sleep with the sound of your own ear shattering snores to let you know all is not well in the nasal passages.

Before I could draw any firm conclusions on my health status (I don’t like to rush these things, I’m a firm believer in the body being able to fix itself given time, rest and enough chicken soup.) I got a very clear message from my body that it was tired of me sitting around trying to get better on my own. I rolled out of bed one morning, stood up, and hit the floor in an ungainly tangle of limbs. Now this is an unpleasant way to start the day to say the least, but what made it infinitely worse was the fact I couldn’t get off the floor, because it was spinning away from me. This was a new development, and I can’t say as I enjoyed it. I then made the grave mistake of opening my eyes, only to see the entire room jumping and flickering like the vertical hold on my eyes had gone haywire. Great, so now my vision is shot AND I’m on the Tilt-A-Whirl from hell. I shut my eyes, grabbed the dresser I was huddled against, and hung on for dear life until the world stopped moving. For those who have never suffered it? Vertigo sucks.

When the world started behaving normally and ceased frolicking around me like lambs in the springtime, I very gingerly got to my feet and discovered that I now had a lingering sense of being out of synch with the universe, which translated into a mild form of motion sickness. Now, my inner ears are so wonky that I have to take Gravol just to watch an Imax movie if I want to hold down my popcorn, so this is nothing new, but it’s not something I want to deal with every time I take a step or turn my head.

Over the next few days I learned a few things I could have gone a lifetime without knowing. I move a lot more than I thought I did, even when “sitting still.” High heel shoes are by no means a stable platform, and the medical profession needs to invent antibiotics that do not taste like licking the inside of a dumpster.

My doc figures I’ll be able to get out of bed without fear in a week to ten days, so until then sitting up or rolling over come with the need to breathe deep and hang on for dear life while the world takes me for a ride. I never liked roller coasters or carnival rides, so I think it’s entirely unfair that I currently have all the free rides I could possibly want at my disposal. All I have to do is shake my head and hang on.