Catching Up (Tuesday/Thursday)

Tuesday:

I only work two days a week, officially, but I just got home from a four-hour residency seminar that is not on one of my usual work days, so that's another day, kind of. Plus I have an eight-hour training day this week. Work eats up my life if I let it even if I "only" work two days a week.

At the seminar, I ran into four people I went to school with. (I don't usually see them because I belong to a different group that meets on a different day, but today I was making up for missing my usual day.) It was interesting talking to them. They've mostly been there since January (I hired on in July) and are in various places in the main hospital. (There are two of us who work in psych, a woman who was a tech in psych for seven years before going back to school, and myself. I never thought I'd work psych, especially in-patient psych on a locked unit, but I really like the job.)

And I'm sick. I started getting sick last Wednesday--sore throat, dried out sinuses--and then it was all downhill from there. Something is felling all my co-workers. I worked Thursday and Saturday nights because they were short and I didn't want to call in even though I felt like crap, but I've gotten texts every day since then asking me to work. I'm, like, no. I'm also sick. I'm just not calling in (even when I probably should). Anyway, my sore throat is gone, but it moved into my sinuses and down into my chest. I have a cough that brings up yellow-ish mucus (aren't you glad you asked?) and my nose is draining some yucky stuff. But it's getting better. I spent all day yesterday in bed, but I needed to.

While I was in bed, I was reading. One of my coworkers who I really get along with (and who has a PhD in library science and a nearly 10K volume personal library) sent me a kindle book that she really enjoyed (Moon Called by Patricia Briggs). It's about werewolves and vampires and the like--not something I'd ever choose to read on my own, being a literature snob with a degree in literature, sniff-sniff--but I started it and finished it in a day and then started and finished the second book in the series (Blood Bound, which focuses less on the werewolves and more on the vampires) on the same day. I was going to kindle the third, but decided against it because reading on the kindle for too many hours at once messes with my eyes. It causes the vision in my left eye to go fuzzy and for me to see all the floaters that I can usually ignore and for both eyes to become more sensitive to certain kinds of light. All of that takes days and sometimes weeks to wear off. So I may order the paperback versions of the rest of the series (I think there are eleven books in all--nope, I just looked and the twelfth book in the series was released this past march.) As I said, the fantasy genre is not my bag usually, but so far these books are well-written, well-paced, and thoroughly engrossing. I've not regretted reading them or felt like, ugh, why did I even read that? the way I sometimes do when I read something that's the literary equivalent of junk food. That's about as hearty a recommendation as I can give these days.

Speaking of junk food, while I've been sick, we've been living on take-out. Last night was pizza for Dave and a veggie sub for me. The night before was greek take-out. The night before that, I worked, but my "lunch" (eaten around 4:40 in the morning) was a take-out noodle bowl with tofu from the Vietnamese place where we go for bahn-mi. I've been eating well, but all take-out is inherently too salty for the diet I'm supposed to be following.

Thursday:

I'm still sick.

I've gone through another book and a half in the werewolf/vampire series. They're really well written. I've been changing the settings on my kindle, varying them, to see if that makes a difference to the problem that I get with my eyes when using the kindle. (I think some of it might be that I read the kindle at a fixed distance for hours on end.) Mostly I just want to keep reading these novels. It's distracting while I'm just lying in bed being sick.

I hate being sick.