The Worst Cough Ever

Hi friends. It is 5 AM. Do you know where your kids are? Ha. Ok, here's the deal. I've been sick sick sick since Saturday, and now my terrible cold has been replaced with a terrible cough. I was sleeping on and off, waking myself up coughing all night. The last time I looked at the clock it was 2:30, so when I saw it was 5:17, I realized that was all the sleep I was getting.

Let's be real here; my cough syrup nighttime medicine that the pharmacist said would "help me sleep" did nothing but remind me of throwing up like-minded medicines as a child. Liquid medicines still freak me out. Ugh. The Delsym cough relief, "the strongest over-the-counter" remedy, or so says the pharmacist, was a glorified cough drop. It kinda numbed my tongue and 15 minutes later, I was still coughing. I'm going to Urgent care in 3 hours, I just have to wait until it's open. I live a fast, glamorous and sexy life, I know.

Here's a lovely webcam shot of me and Lady as I write this. Yes, I woke her up by coughing, and my poor husband (who is sleeping in the guest room because he has a busy life this week and needs to sleep) woke up, too and took her out for me. So now she's in bed with me, sniffing at my keyboard as we speak. She's blurry in this picture because she's a trying really hard to lick me in the mouth. No, not on the lips, IN THE MOUTH. She's a french dog! She doesn't stop until she hits tonsils. She's been like this since the day we got her. Affectionate til the point of choking. It's lovely.

There. There's her face. It's 5:40 now, so it seems SUPER IMPORTANT that I show you her face, even though there's plenty of pictures of her already on this blog. Yikes. Sleep-deprived!

Ok, so I was lying in bed, coughing, and thinking about when the last REALLY bad cough of mine hit. I usually get coughs after colds, but rarely are they this bad. Anyway, the last cough I had that was this bad (that made me sad and miss my dad) was in 7th grade.

It was finals week of the trimester (yeah, trimesters. groups of threes. groovy) and I had just gotten over a terrible cold and was back in school in time for a science final. All 50 of us 7th graders were in a big room because they were building a new wing of the school, so we were crammed in for the time being. And the tests were handed out. And everyone was nervous because these tests were super hard. And I could not stop coughing.

I would hold my breath for a while or not swallow just to make time in between coughs, but let's be real, that doesn't count as "not coughing". Eventually my teacher asked me to go get a drink of water. There's 2 things wrong with this suggestion:
1. Drinking fountains make it terribly hard to actually get a good amount of water down without making it look like you're getting to 1st base with something every kid in the school has probably at one point had they're mouth on and
2. Water really doesn't do anything for a cough this bad. It barely helps at all.

So the rest of the test was embarrassing and once I finished I went to the nurse and she tried to give me cough syrup, but I worked myself into a nervous fit and threw it up (as was my custom). And then I got sent home. And this wasn't as exciting for me as it was for other kids. When I was home sick, my dad would say something like "if you're too sick for school, you're too sick for tv". So I'd be in bed, in my room, sitting. Usually feeling sick. Sometimes I mixed it up and sat on the couch. Pretty wild, I know.

So yeah. I wish I could get sent home to sit on my parent's couch right now. I'd be fine with just sitting there. There's probably nothing good on TV this early anyway.