And here I am again, exact. same. sickness. Day one, my throat and roof of my mouth feels itchy. By Day 3 or 4, my head is fully congested and I am breathing exclusively through my mouth. Because my nasal passages are the thickness of those thin plastic straws used as coffee stirrers, I congest easily.

And then the cough starts. Its a dry, unproductive, bone-rattling, bark of a cough. It feels like I have feathers, or itching powder, or dust, in my bronchial tubes. Nothing helps: not Nyquil, or coughdrops. Drinking water helps a little, because it usually allows some moisture to get coughed back up and that settles the itchyness for a little while. Then it slowly builds again until I can’t suppress the urge anymore.

Last Sunday is when my throat started feeling itchy. I took Monday off work hoping to not spread the disease around and wishing that it would just go away. Tuesday, I felt mostly “normal” so I went to work. Wednesday and Thursday I had off, and that’s when I really started feeling it. Friday, I’m sure I annoyed the piss out of everyone in DC3 by coughing and coughing, and coughing.

Friday evening my teammate Andrew treated our team to some awesome traditional Chinese food. The food was spicy. To me, super spicy. It cleared up my sinuses and the whole drive home, I felt great. But I still coughed. And the spicy eventually wore off and my congestion came back.

Here it is Sunday night again, and here I am, coughing, congested. I’ve coughed so much over the past few days I lost my voice (again – it happened last time too). I can’t sleep because I just lay there and cough. I’ve got to get up at 3:30am and put the finishing touches on the crockpot stew I made tonight and then get ready for work so I can walk out of the apartment by no later than 6am.

I can hear people asking, “Why don’t you go to a doctor?” – Because, I’ve had this so many times before, and gone to a doctor, only to be told “You probably just have a cold virus. There’s nothing we can give you that will make this go away faster. Just drink plenty of fluids, and get some rest.” Or, a couple of times, they’ve given me a week’s worth of antibiotics, which I take, and which are just as useless as Nyquil and cough drops against whatever-the-fuck-this-is.

The dishwasher/sink saga continues.. a couple weeks ago I decided to call the apt complex office to see what their progress was on getting a new seal for our dishwasher, since when it leaked in late January I was told that the maintenance guy who cleaned the seal the day before filled it up with water and that was what leaked out on the floor/carpet in our kitchen/dining room. Turns out that wasn’t the case at all – their new story is that the drain pipe backed up, filled up our kitchen drain with water, which then backed down into the dishwasher and filled it with water, which then leaked on the floor since it overfilled the dishwasher. They said that they ended up snaking the drain then and that is why we haven’t been hearing the drain gurgle and having the upstairs neighbor’s dishwasher foam back up in our left kitchen sink since that time. However, a couple days ago I started hearing gurgling noises again, so I think I’m going to call them and say something like – “Hey, our kitchen sink is gurgling again.. please remember the last time we warned you about this, we had water all over our dining room carpet despite all reassurances from maintenance that the drain was working fine.”
The dishwasher itself seems to be working alright. It does still leak a small amount of water when running it, but just putting a towel under the door sops it up. The last time the maintenance guy was here I told him about the burning smell coming from it, and sure enough there was a plastic lid and several plastic spoons melted onto the heating element which he removed.