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Small steps

Today I was trading e-mails with Kevin at NIH in preparation for my trip next week. I warned him that even though I’m doing much better, I’m still coughing a lot and am still quite congested. I’m so worried about how that will affect my tests. He e-mailed back, “Heather, don’t worry about your cold. You just get through this week and get here safely and we’ll take care of you when you get here.” AAAhhhh…..what a soothing thing to say! Grin! I’m sure he has no idea.

I don’t mean to gripe so much about being single (although when I’ve written about being single and TV shows, I get the most e-mail!) – but sometimes being alone and sick is not a good combination. It’s the little things. How nice it would be, for example, to have someone come home and bring you a box of Puffs with aloe on them for a sore nose. Yes, I have friends I can call to pick things up at the drug store if I can’t do it. I’m sure someone from my church would be only to happy to do it. That’s not the point. It would just be so nice to have someone just do it without having to ask. It would be nice to have someone to go to a doctor’s appointment and back up your claims of excessive coughing. It would be nice to have someone make a pot of soup, or do the dishes, or put up the Christmas tree – someone who’s related so you don’t have to be worried about whether the house is a mess. If someone showed up right now to help me put up the tree I'd be mortified because my place is a "pigsty" as my mom would say. Oink Oink.

I am getting better. No upset tummy today, but more coughing and nose blowing. Every time I blow my nose it sounds so gross! My poor co-workers must just cringe. Yet, I had plenty of energy to make it through the work day and run errands afterwards, even negotiating the construction sites on the way home.

If I don’t manage to break a limb doing that, I’m going to cause a car accident as the cars on Metcalf, a very, very busy four lane street, see me teetering around the holes and over the mounds of rock, dirt and debris with my long white cane and all slow down (probably trying to figure out how they can stop to help.) Sooner or later someone is going to be so pre-occupied with the show that someone’s going to plow into the back of another car.

Mind you, it isn’t that I can’t negotiate the obstacles. It’s nothing compared to some of the mountain climbing I did in my younger days – it’s just that I shouldn’t be doing it. Grin!

Thankfully, I am doing better and probably by the time I finally get to NIH where Kevin can treat me, I’ll be just fine for the first time in more than a month. HA!

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