Can I Have a Do-Over Once My Body Stops Destroying Itself? (An IWSG Post)

So here we are, with the first Insecure Writer’s Support Group post of 2016. I had plans for this post. I intended to talk about how I’ve got high hopes for 2016. I was going to tell you all about how I’ve learned from several mistakes, gotten myself a little more organized, and have every intention of kicking ass when it comes to my new goals. I was going to tell you about how I plan to finish a mostly-done novel this month before starting on a new one, which I plan to have completed by the end of the year. I was going to tell you guys that this is the year of Tracey. I’m going to get this nonsense figured out, and I’m going to be a mother, a wife, an instrumentation technician, and a writer, all at once, dammit.

I was going to tell you guys all of that. And then I got sick. And the truth is that I just don’t have the goddamn energy or happy-go-lucky attitude required.

I didn’t write any fiction at all in the first couple of days of the new year because I was trying to get ahead of a few blog posts and get some other thoughts down on paper, but by day 3 I was intending to get hard to work on that almost-finished novel, before I woke up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Runny nose, sore throat, achy body…your standard cold fare. I’d also not had that much sleep the night before, so I kicked hubby out of bed, sent the kid downstairs with him, and just melted under the covers for a while. I got little to nothing done that day or the next, aside from helping to put the Christmas decorations away in a half-awake medicated state. I thought to myself, surely this won’t last that much longer? Even though my throat hurt every time I swallowed I’d managed to keep myself from coughing too much, so I wasn’t destroying it like I usually do, and I’d been getting lots of rest and “relaxation”, so surely this was going to be over soon, right?

But then, yesterday, something weird added itself to the list of maladies: my jaw started to hurt. And I don’t mean it ached a little…I mean, there was this pain radiating up through my jawbone and right through all the teeth on the left side of my head. It felt like I’d suddenly sprouted half a dozen improperly-aligned wisdom teeth. I thought it was something I’d done without realizing it – maybe I’d been grinding my teeth or something? – but I didn’t think too much of it…until this morning. This morning I woke up with another, much worse, symptom: an earache that felt like someone had jammed a railroad spike through my head. Ladies and gentlemen, I consider myself to have a fairly decent pain threshold – I mostly just cursed like a sailor when I broke my toe, and I survived the first 13 hours of back-labor without any drugs – so believe me when I tell you this hurt a LOT. I shipped myself off to outpatients, where I sat for almost two hours goddammit, trying my very best not to burst into tears, until finally a doctor looked at me and informed me that my head is basically pressurized with fluids because my nasal cavities are so narrow that it can’t all come out unless I force it to. In other words, I waited for two hours for him to tell me to blow my nose…a lot.

That wasn’t the best part though. No, the best part was the after-effect of my head’s desire to hold in as many fluids as possible. Turns out I developed not one, not two, but THREE separate infections…simultaneously. And since I’m allergic to amoxicillin, the antibiotics I was eventually given (which I have to take for an entire week, by the way) are a type that are known to cause gastrointestinal distress. Because, ya know…I don’t have enough of that to deal with all on my own.

So, long story short, I’m feeling a little bit down in the dumps today, both physically (obviously) and mentally. I’d planned to start 2016 off with a bang, getting myself all organized, setting some perfectly reasonable goals, and finally sitting down to do some real writing, and now this has happened and it’s taken pretty much all of my energy to sit down and write this post (while snuggled in bed with a wastebasket of used tissues next to me and a mini-Magic Bag on my poor ear).

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t have much good to say today, no pearls of wisdom or hopeful, “fingers crossed” kinds of sharing. Mostly I just want to curl up into a ball, watch Doctor Who, and pray that this thing buggers off before I have to get on an airplane to head back out to work. -_-