This better be worth it

Many of us have the nasty tendency to get sick as soon as we go on vacation, go home for the holidays, or finish exams. Just when we want to relax and celebrate whatever stressful period we've just made it through, we end up in bed with glasses of orange juice and a box of tissues and watching daytime movies on TV. In some ways, it's a testament to the way our body is designed, that we are able to push through stressful situations when logic would say that we should have already caught that cold that's going around.

No such luck for me - I am sick now, and I still have two weeks to go of work and stress. I guess I cracked before I hit the home stretch. It may not be as bad as I'm making it out to be, but I don't know what 'it' is. It's not the normal cold, and it's not a full scale flu. As I posted before, it does suck the sleep out of me. Last night I slept for 11 hours. I fell asleep at 8:15pm, concerned that I might wake up at 1am wide awake. I didn't wake up for the first time until 4:30am and then happily fell back asleep until 7:30am.

The idea behind this marathon sleep was to kick whatever I'm fighting off and be able to go into work today. No such luck. My sinuses are tight (not congested, just tight), my body aches, and all I want to do is....go back to sleep. Crazy, I know. I've thought about the idea that maybe I am mentally just shutting down under the stress of work, and it's taking the form of this. And yet here I am on my laptop, sitting in bed, working anyway. I've committed to work 50% today (there are some conference calls with people in South Africa and the US that I can't postpone), and I am still taking the total 6 hour round trip train to a town near Bournemouth tomorrow where there is another client office.

I'm not really looking for pity. All I have to say is that trying to get through these last few weeks of work AND being sick better be worth it. I am plannning on being healthy and celebratory for my one brief week at home in California, and then I'm back in London for New Years for another 4 days of vacation. And now...another nap.