overkill?

I felt like crap at school yesterday. Sneezy, coughy, achey, tiredy, cranky, stuffy, sore throaty, and drippy were all micro dwarves inhabiting my body. It was the pits. I could barely stand up by the end of class.

It's a deceptively long day. I finish teaching by 2:30, which sounds pretty good. But I start school at 7 am. Then, on Tuesdays I have my extra curricular activity to teach. Ji's cool teacher, Teacher Marc From Canada and I team-teach English Speech and Drama. It is damn lucky that Marc is doing the class with me now, because last term it was me and 6 rangy, pent-up boys. We've split the class for the drama we're working on (a space crew meets aliens thingy) and heh heh heh I have happily ended up leading the girls' alien team and Marc is leading the boys' spacemen team. Last week the boys were voting on what to name their spaceship and Marc had to check with the Vice Principal whether Super Toilet would be allowed. Nope. So they are back to the old drawing board. I, meanwhile, have smartly plotted to have the girls dressed up as alien/fairies...so they all get to wear party dresses, wave wands, wear wings, and deely-bopper hair bands with alien googly things or horns. I am s-m-r-t.

Fortunately yesterday was a Wednesday, an easy day, but after spending hours telling my kids to please use quieter voices FOR THE FREAKING LOVE OF GOD I was wiped out. And sick. I went to Ji's room where he was still sleeping and lay down with him and dozed for 45 minutes. When it was time to go home, I dragged myself out to Ekkamai and we caught a cab home.

Bangkok is great for cab-availability. You can always catch a cab, except it you are going long distances on a Friday night, which you REALLY don't want to do anyways because it will take 3 hours to get anywhere and you really might as well either take the subway or stay at home. But other than that, cabs are really easy to grab. The school is only a 20 minute walk away, so most days I try to walk home and only take a cab in the morning. But if I'm sick or Ji's sick, I cave in and grab a taxi.

I got the cab driver to stop and let us out at the corner store that has a pharmacy so I could stock up on remedies for my illness. I think I may have gone a little overboard, however. It's like the dieters' adage: don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry. Well: don't go pharmaceutical shopping when you're sick, I say. I got home with my bag of goodies, and ingested the following:

Yes, the "buddy dean" instant coffee - with sugar! and creamer! - is damn classy. I know. So that was a good start, coffee and tylenol. Started to clear the headache. But I was still sniffly, so I took:

Probably I didn't really need to take BOTH the clarityne (loratadine) and the dimetapp. But the thing is that the clarityne is sort of low key and takes awhile to kick in, but the dimetapp knocks my socks off, and works fast. So I took both.

Then, I decided to make some dinner, so I put on an egg for Ji and started to fix up some potato salad for me. But I was kind of achy still, and I'd bought some booze the day earlier to help combat cramps, so then I had:

Spy is the Canada Cooler of Thailand. I think it's made by the whisky company. It's not half bad. Certainly not as bad as Hanoi's Thang Long fruit wine (eehhhh). I figured the vitamin c 'sweetlets' would give me a boost, and of course I am keen on preventing scurvy.

I managed to finish fixing and eating dinner, then went to lie down on the couch while Ji played with his trains and trucks. But for some unknown reason my nose was STILL stuffed up. So I dragged myself to the bathroom, and had:

The Sinex squirt worked great, and I just, y'know, thought that maybe I should have another dose of dimetapp.

Does it surprise you that I could no longer open my eyes by 7:30 pm?

I was lying there on the couch telling Ji "I can play with you with my eyes closed, don't worry. I'm still giving you 100% attention." I can't remember what we were playing, but somehow I managed to convince him that I was conscious. By 8:00 the couch wasn't comfortable enough so I made Ji go to bed. I'm not all rotten, though, I let him read for an hour while I floated on my bed. Then I scuffled over and turned off the light and didn't wake up for another 10 hours. [Bangkok-2-June-2005]