Amidst our lovely rainless humid hazy heat wave of the past week or so, I somehow managed to come down with a cold, one with ever-changing symptoms. As soon as I shake off one, I get a different one: sore throat, then fever with chills and hot flashes, then congestion, then 70-pack-a-day-habit-cigarette-voice... It started Sunday night, I (stupidly) worked through it on Monday and Tuesday, then took a sicky on Wednesday. Today I'm working again, but from bed, and I'm forcing myself to take things easy. I might not even do the afternoon yet, we'll see.

It's annoying because my immune system is usually much better than this. Since leaving high school, I can count years between periods of sickness that have taken me longer than a day to get over. My type-A tendencies demand that I jump up and do chores, at the very least, and scold me for missing exercise. No, it's not fair to myself, and yes, I just make myself sicker by obeying that nagging, blood-pressure-spiking voice in my head. I'm slowly, slowly getting better at telling it to chill out, but it still manages to hijack me far too often.

Protip: never ever use WebMD to look up your symptoms. That shit will make a hypochondriac out of anyone. On Monday night, I threw in "sore throat" and "fever," just to see what the likely candidates were. Along with reasonable things like cold, flu, strep throat (probably not; my tonsils were taken out when I was eight), and tonsilitis (OK, definitely not), they listed toxic shock syndrome and breast cancer. Not that serious, not that serious, HOLY SHIT YOU ARE TOTALLY DYING. Can't they at least put those things under a heading of "This is possible, but not likely?"