My family has been telling me I needed to slow down for months now. My response has invariably been “I can’t.” I couldn’t slack off on any of my three jobs. And the writing…well, that’s the only thing I do for me, so not dropping that either. Consequently, I got floored by a hideous sinus infection in January. Was off work for the better part of a week. Finally got past that, and it was back to the insane schedule I keep. Except worse. Invariably I’m underslept during the week. 6.5 to 7 hours is not adequate. My body wants 10 hours. My parents were convinced that it was a teen-aged thing, but I’m approaching 30 and that hasn’t changed. Of course, I inevitably have too much to do to get 10 hours a night. On a regular basis, I depend on weekends for catching up on sleep. Except for the month of February, I didn’t get it. I was out of town travelling or tied up with one thing or another EVERY weekend for the month of February. And frankly, I’ve been exhausted.
Well, after coming home from my tour of the state around my mom’s knee surgery and my friend’s wedding this past weekend, I was up at 5:10 yesterday to walk per usual. Went to work. And by three fifteen, I felt so bad, I took the rest of the afternoon off to come home.
And guess what? I had a fever. Joy. So I immediately crawled into bed for one of those freezing, buried under every blanket in the house, achy kind of naps. By the time I woke up, the fever was over 101. Great. It’s been up and down the last 18 hours or so, and I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at 3 per Mom’s orders (she’s convinced I’ll get pneumonia if I don’t get it taken care of). So I’m camped out on the sofa with piles of blankets and my comfy kitty socks and favorite sweatshirt waiting for that. I’m trying to motivate myself to finish writing the unit test for my students next week (see…I still have crap I can’t put off). I think I’m going to nap again instead.
So the take home message here is that if you don’t take the time to take care of yourself, mother nature is going to knock you on your butt and make you.
