The Sickness Takes Hold (and a bonus recipe)

My past week can only be described as a congested nightmare; as it turns out, my immune system doesn’t love me anymore and proceeded to dump the nastiest cold I’ve ever had on me. (Well. It might be more of a “I’m in college now, so my sickness treatment consists of lying in bed and miserably chugging lukewarm powerade” kind of cold.)

Colds are something that I used to be above. I would laugh at the paltry attempts of any virus to get into my immune system, knowing ultimately they would fail. Then I got COVID-19 before there was a vaccine, and promptly face-planted in the dirt.

This has forced me to “take a break” (ew) and stay in bed most of the day, doing homework from the comfort of my blankets instead of my desk, less than four feet away. It also means having to forgo my nightly campus walks, or as they’ve been coined, my “Campus Scuttles”. Those more or less just mean that I wander the campus after dark until my apple watch is satisfied, and I’ve scared the pants off some poor student who was just trying to walk home from their evening class. My crowning achievement was the time I was crawling along the railing of the walkway on a bridge in the shadows, listening to ghostbusters on full blast. I accidentally zoomed past a couple who were passionately making out under the tunnel, leading them to break apart and one of them to cry out, “what the frick was that?”

Either way, it’s not exactly an inspiring workout routine, but one that I’ve dropped nonetheless for this stupid cold.

I’m not someone who takes breaks. That’s not a humble brag or something to add to my resume, it’s more of a terrible fact. I don’t nap, I don’t take days off, and if I have free time, I feel an all-consuming guilt for not doing more work. Just ask my wrist brace, which I am constantly in and out of because I can’t give art a break or I think I might die.

But, I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve realized if I don’t take breaks sometimes my body will take it for me, and I’m not really enjoying its prescribed downtime right now.

This entry is pretty long at this point. It’s kind of starting to read like those mega-long introductions for a recipe on a recipe blog, and you’re sitting there wondering when we’ll skip past the tragic death of Peepaw and get to the onions already.

Here’s my award-winning recipe I made today, with step-by-step instructions

Ingredients: 1 can of lime Liquid Death, 1 large yeti cup, 1 limeade drink powder packet

1. Pour liquid death into yeti cup
2. Pour powder on top of this
3. Realize that the carbonation is reacting with the powder, making it suddenly fizz and rise very fast
4. Hastily try to sip off the foam from the top
5. Realize that the powder has settled on top of this foam without mixing in, leading you to snort the bitter lime powder like the world’s worst cocaine
6. Reel back, going “blech!!”
7. Repeat twice.

That was my attempt to get myself to hydrate better. It was…not encouraging.

Anyway. I’m going to return to my sorry excuse for a break, and see if maybe tomorrow my body will hate me less. After the lime-on-lime-crime, I doubt it.