Ghost of Christmas Lost......

I seem to have mislaid most of the past week due to having been laid low with a lingering lurgy.

It started on the morning of Christmas Eve.... headache, sore throat, aches and pains, chills and sweats.  By the morning of Christmas Day my chest was tight, I was running a temperature and my hitherto husky voice became non-existent.  I have a vague recollection of the family arriving, and of trying to join in the festivities but my late afternoon I was flagging and crawled upstairs to bed.

I have no recollection at all of Boxing Day, which I spent in bed in a state of pyretic delirium which gave my few waking moments a nightmarish quality reminiscent of a Tim Burton film.

Naturally, it proved impossible to gain access to a doctor, it being Christmas and all, so while the chest infection made itself at home in my lungs, I subsisted on Paracetamol, Lucozade and Benylin and tried to wait it out.

The undisputed heroine of the hour is PP who single-handedly coped with a houseful of visitors, preparation of the Christmas dinner and all of the attendant brouhaha, while simultaneously tending to me in quarantine all this week.  She's been like the Christmas Fairy and Florence Nightingale rolled into one.

Small Dog also deserves honourable mention for rarely leaving my side, despite the constant lure of delicious treats downstairs.

By Friday, I was feeling no better, but PP finally managed to contact our GP who prescribed a mega dose of antibiotics..... better late than never.

It's now Sunday and I've lost the best part of a week.  I'm still feeling fairly rough, although this morning I managed to shower, albeit by sitting in the shower tray as I don't have the energy to stand.  I've also succeeded in making the arduous journey from the bed to the sofa downstairs, where I now sit, resplendent in mis-matched pyjamas and a moth-eaten old dressing gown, gasping and wheezing and hoping we don't get any visitors.

Aside from having missed the whole of Christmas and the Twixmas period, I'm feeling peeved at missing out on all the delicious food and drink.  Even my most favourite Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, bought especially for Christmas, tastes like wormwood.

On the plus side...... well, there is no plus side.  Unless you count the loss of 5 1/2 lbs.  I'm possibly the only person in the UK to have actually lost weight this week.

Even though we were nominally off work this week, I had looked forward to making progress on my little shop, and doing some traditional forward planning for the first half of 2013.  We had also planned to spend New Year with my daughter, who has just returned from holiday, but I'm not well enough to travel so that's out too.

I can draw some comfort from the fact that I'm on the road to recovery.  Except I have to take into account that my MS is waiting in the wings to administer what fellow MSers will recognise as (in technical terms) a good kicking.

MS doesn't like playing second fiddle and already it's re-asserting its place in the pecking order by knocking my balance and coordination for six, ratcheting up my pain levels and generally showing me who's boss for succumbing to a two-bit common or garden chest infection.  However, it's a toss-up as to which of them is responsible for my negative energy levels, upon which not even industrial quantities of Lucozade are making any impact.

Still......here's to 2013...... I can hardly wait. 


*sigh... cough, splutter, gasp, choke*