It’s Just a Cold

I currently feel like ‘Death Warmed Up’. That metaphorical description certainly applied to me this morning when I woke up. My head ached, my stomach muscles ached and I wouldn’t have minded dying. Having a cold is never a pleasant thing, and I’m glad I rarely get them. But golly gee, I sure have one now!

My husband and son have been suffering from a cold and cough for a few days, but I was glad not to have succumbed to their cold germs. That all changed yesterday though. I began to cough too, an annoying ticking coughing that went well into the night, the night before last.

We have all been getting stuck into cough medicine, and the menfolk seemed to be getting a little better. I hoped I would soon be heading toward ‘betterness’ too. But this morning I felt a million miles away from feeling better. I felt like an aching death had invaded my body. My coughing obviously uses muscles rarely used, and they were aching in protest.

I don’t know how long my body will take to get better. Usually a cold takes a week to get over, and I’m only two days into my cold so far. I’m at the coughing and prickly nose stage with associated head and body aches. It’s not a fun stage to be at. At the moment, I think the panadol I’ve taken is working on the aches, and it feels like living has become a very real possibility, something to look forward to.

I’m conscious of the fact that it may take me longer than a week to get over my cold though. Having MS, and being on a medication that negatively affects my immune system can slow down the healing process. I have a positive attitude to life though, and I keep healthy, apart from having multiple sclerosis.

So it’s just a cold I have, the common cold, which hasn’t been so common for me, and I’m glad about that. I will keep on taking couch medicine and panadol as needed, and keeping up my intake of fluids. The sun is shining beautifully outside, and I’m planning on going out there to get some natural Vitamin D on my skin, as well as the Vitamin D I had from a tablet earlier today.

Yes, water and sunshine is my plan to get over this nasty cold.

Do you love trees?

I do, I love them very much. I am a few different things, and lover of Nature is certainly one of those things.

I love Nature, especially trees, clouds and birds. I spend some time almost every day, and certainly at least once a week, contemplating Nature in a meditative way. I sometimes sit on our front veranda, watching birds and clouds and trees. The tree on this page was the focus of a recent article I wrote.

I am the editor of the Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. This publication is a newsletter published monthly, and focused on the town of Mallala. I have lived in the Mallala district since late 1988. We moved out there from a lovely cottage in St Morris, so that we could begin breeding dogs.

At the time, my husband Graham and I were involved in showing dogs, and breeding them seemed to be a natural progression. We moved to the country with our pure bred Schnauzer, and our crossbred dog, and the dog breeding/showing began.

At that time, we didn’t have any children, and I wasn’t going to have any kids, I wanted to go on breeding and showing dogs for the rest of my life. My body had other thoughts though, and soon enough I was getting quite desperate to be a real mum, not just the dog’s mum. Nature took its time, but soon enough, we were blessed with a human baby for me to care for.

I resigned from work and settled down to be a stay-at-home mum. That was nearly twenty years ago – we all settled in to living in the country (the only home our son has ever known), and we did our best to become ‘country people’. I found that I loved this country life, where the sun and the wind and rain were more important than climbing any corporate ladder (for me anyway, Graham still had that climb to do for many more years).

Things were going well, but between us, we found many other things to do on the weekend, and the dog showing thing lost its interest to us. In the meantime though, we’d taken on another dog breed – the Pharaoh Hound, breeding a couple of litters, but that wasn’t enough to keep us heading off to the dog shows.

We still have one Schnauzer, and we have three Pharaoh Hounds. They’re pet dogs now, and we’re all enjoying ourselves. I’ve become ever more interested in creative writing, and Graham and Jake are both involved in the Mallala Lawn Bowls club. They both have other things that are important to them too. We’re far too busy for dog shows!

So life is going well, but of course there are always things that happen that might throw a spanner in the works. My spanner in the words has been multiple sclerosis (ms). This chronic illness came along in early 2010, and it’s still there, making my life, our lives, a bit more challenging. 

MS is an illness that causes the body’s immune system to attack the Central Nervous System (CNS). It causes lesions/scarring along the linings of the CNS. This causes nerve impulses not to go where they should go, or to be halted. As a result, various parts of the body don’t work properly in people with MS.

There are various medications that may help to slow the progression of this disease, abut at this point, there is still no cure. I’m living well enough with MS. I’m on a new medication that seems to be controlling my ms, so that my body can heal some of the scarring, and my disability is somewhat lessened. I still can feel the disability though – when I get stressed or get too hot, my symptoms come back to haunt me…

Watching Nature helps me to conquer stress, most of the time. Sitting and watching the trees, like the one here, helps me to stay serene…