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Is now yellow, red and quite bruised. Still begs the question: How did I go to bed with bronchitis and wake up with a black eye. Ow. It hurts.

I’ve been doing a lot of nothing except shuffling around my house wearing two sweatshirts and groaning every now and again, hoping that at some point my fever will come down to something approaching normal (which is not, ahem, 38.7 degrees Celcius).

Yesterday I watched movies. All day. And I didn’t even get that too-much-television headache. I simply couldn’t move. Except to get up and drink a half-cup of apple juice.

So I watched Touching the Void, a truly exceptional documentary about two men who climb the west face of the Andean mountain, Siula Grande. Then, I watched Reese Whitherspoon in Vanity Fair, which I had high hopes for having absolutely loved Mira Nair’s Moonsoon Wedding, and I thought Hysterical Blindess, the HBO film she did was also quite good. But it’s kind of eh, the story never reaches the amount of tension it really needs to portray the tragedy and/or strength in Becky Sharp’s character.

And then, in a fit of absolute fever-inspired weakness, I watched Shall We Dance. No, not the original Japanese version, but the Hollywood one with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez. Yeah, at the end, I bawled, and bawled, like a baby. What’s wrong with me? I decided enough’s enough and went to bed at that point. Maybe today the fever won’t be boiling my brain so much that I actually thought Shall We Dance wasn’t half bad. Ouch! Eck! Ow! Stop throwing things at me, I said I was sick, okay?

I woke up this morning with a black eye. Things have gone from bad to worse…

Well, turns out my bad disease day was just the beginning. I started getting a bit of a cold on Wednesday night, but took some vitamin C and garlic, then drank some throat tea thinking that might send it off into virus hell before I actually got sick.

HA! Fat chance, by Thursday I was running a fever and all the other good stuff, feeling like pack of brick was laying on my chest. Called the doctor, made an appointment for Friday with my fingers crossed that it hadn’t turned into something really bad.

Boy was I wrong. Couldn’t sleep, fever burned even with the Tylenol and by the time I got to the doctor’s I could barely breath without coughing. She says, “Oh boy,” listens to my chest and says, “It’s bronchitis, but it could have already turned into pneumonia–do you want to get a chest x-ray to be sure.” I nodded my head and said, “No, if the treatments the same, just get me started on the antibiotics and I’ll go from there.”

Um, so in the course of less that 48-hours, a common cold that might make a normal person sniffly for a day or two chased its way like a rainbow after a storm straight into my chest giving me freaking pneumonia. And that’s the way things go when you’ve got an auto-immune disease that makes you take drugs that suppress your immune system. I’m telling you, it’s been years since I’ve been this sick, and of course, it has to happen within a couple of weeks of starting my new job.

Oh, but I’ve added another title to my 50 Book Challenge. I’ll write another entry about it later, when I can actually see the screen without having a blinding headache. And pardon the spelling errors, I’m just typing and posting, screw that perfectionist crap.

Well, the Boss From Hell only hires MBAs to do her dirty work, maybe this article explains why–because they have no souls…

…has arrived and I’m not feeling any better. In fact, I’ve started coughing and my throat is scratchy. Stupid disease, making me take the stupid drugs that shut off my immune system so I pick up any virus that your uncle’s sister’s daughter’s schoolteacher might have.

I read a funny article yesterday about a man who claims to be a serial unfinisher of books. I might have to claim ownership of that title as well. Currently, I’m reading a number of books in the vain hope of actually finishing the 50 Book Challenge: Saturday by Ian McEwan, Playing with Matches by Amy Cameron, and Start Late, Finish Rich by David Bach. Well there’s actually one book that I finished this weekend that I can’t talk about because it’s an advance reading copy and I’m not sure if I can spill the beans, but I’m at eleven!

There are so many books I’ve picked up over the years and never actually finished. My book shelves are littered with them, bookmarks hanging out like tongues, panting at the thought of being able to move to another selection, but never having the chance.

I was telling my friend Zesty today that the best thing about my new job is actually still having a life, a life that allows me to get home early enough to make dinner, to write poetry and to read. Now, maybe I’ll actually finish the majority of books I start instead of abandoning them because I’m so stressed out worrying about how the Boss From Hell is going to sabatoge my life.

…And it’s ability to endlessly please me with its never-ending evolution: “Wedgie” enters the dictionary.