Sick day


I woke feeling dreadful. Outside was just as bad as inside me: the air pollution index had shot up to 150 and the rainstorm outside was a nasty shade of tobacco yellow. Instead of taking La Serpiente to school and then going to the office, I sent her out with my wife and then lay down on La Serpiente’s bed, and woke up three hours later, still feeling zonked.

My nose continued to stream out a constant torrent of clear fluid although the monotony of this was interrupted every time I coughed up a big bolus of phlegm; this is nothing to write home about, which was why my wife tried to avoid being home much, and instead took the children to the local play gym while I first moped around, and then went to the doctor to ask for medicine.

The trouble is, it’s only really a chesty cough and an allergy to life, so there’s not much to take for that. I still ended up with a bag of pills (antihistamines, anti-inflammatories for my sore throat, probably a whole bunch of other stuff to counteract whatever side effects those drugs have) and despite taking them I’m still dripping and hacking up mucus and feeling dreadful.

But tomorrow is the weekend, and also I’ve made the happy discovery that Singapore’s library service has an e-book system. Previously there was a large drawback to borrowing books from the library – you can’t read them while putting children to sleep in darkened rooms. So we had the choice of free books, or books we could read. Now, I don’t need to pay Amazon to put books on my Kindle any more, making the fifty dollar library fee seem even more of a bargain. Now I just need to spend my time reading more, and less gasping for air. Onwards to tomorrow.


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