Rise! (Again.)

If you look closely, you can see my energy level.

Let me start by saying this isn’t a “Poor Me” post. But sometimes a little whining is therapeutic.

I was knocked out for a week with laboratory confirmed Flu A. One of the clinicians I work with told me that people who’ve said they’ve had the flu and miss work for a couple of days really haven’t had the flu. I’m starting to think that’s true because as I think back, it seems to me that I haven’t been sick like that in a long, long time. I’m pretty sure I was delirious the first night.

Anyway, I got better but damn if it wasn’t the exact wrong week to miss work. It was a week of project deliverables, most of which made it in. But some didn’t, and still haven’t. So the week I came back (last week) was catch-up week, and I don’t mind telling you it was a harder fight than surviving the flu. I’m still chipping away at it, even as I’m processing this week’s work.

Thing is, all this happened about a week after Boskone, at a time when I just felt I’d recaptured a sense of urgency about my writing. I’m not talking “inspiration to write.” I’m talking about a feeling of something I could harness, aside from my own willpower, to leverage myself out of the writing slump I’ve been in for a couple of years. (Yes, I’m in a slump, despite an upcoming publication.)

But it’s hard having to constantly climb out of a pit, and that’s kind of where I am right now. Not ready to give up or anything, not by a damn sight. Not even as I still feel some lingering effects of something-or-other (shortness of breath, a cough that still hasn’t gone away, near constant malaise and fatigue). My boss (who’s a registered nurse by training) finally chided me enough to give my doctor a call tomorrow.

And, so begins yet another climb back up.