The Adventures of the Blind/Low Vision/Visually Impaired (BLOVI) Girl: Volume 52: The Nasty Winter Bug Kicked my Butt Again!
Last week there was no blog because I was in the bed, unable to move, running a fever and generally feeling like I had been run over by a bus. The odd thing is that I was sick last year with pneumonia at this same time. Like many others, the bizarre weather changes and general fatigue that comes with prepping for the Holidays contributed to my susceptibility to the Uber-bug. I always get sick between Thanksgiving and Christmas usually closer to Christmas. I am beginning to think that I just hit the wall at the end of the year. That is the focus of the blog this week. But first………………
My WTF of the week is that I accidentally figured out how to make my zoom camera focus on my face. I have had my camera, which is attached to a screen, for a year, but for some reason just figured out you could rotate the camera head 180 degrees. So I managed to put the camera on me and zoom in on my face. This was not a good idea. I was stunned at how bad my skin looked and how wrinkled my forehead was. Now I don’t trust any of those people who said I looked the same or looked fine and no Botox or other intervention was needed. My daughter pegged it when she said I had 4 lines on my forehead and three were big and one was smaller and I could maybe get rid of those. She also recently asked me if I could put on makeup some days when I brought her to school so I could win the prettiest mommy contest, which I was now losing. But she was sure I could possibly win with a little makeup on. In the end I did decide to do Botox on the forehead wrinkles. It is my Christmas present to myself. So when you see my next life coaching tip of the week on Monday check out the newly Botoxed forehead. And I don’t recommend zooming in on your face, especially if you have not really seen it in detail for a while.
This week I can’t get enough of Holiday decorations. My house is all done up for the Holidays, although there are still things to be done outside. I am a Holiday decoration junkie. I think it is all the things that sparkle and the color because I can see them. The same thing happened last year with the sparkle lingerie at the Victoria’s Secret. I could have spent hours in the Hobby Lobby and if money was no issue I would have come up with a decoration scheme for every room, including the bathrooms. I have to reign myself in from going “oh a shiny thing” and running toward it. And I just keep picking things up and saying “that is fabulous”. I need lights and sparkly things in the yard this year, so for the first time I am going to do the obnoxious light up yard things, maybe even the ones that blow up. If I can find any kind of changing color disco balls they will be all over the house. My other idea is to get a bunch of flamingos with Santa hats and string lights around them. That sounds cool-right. By this weekend, the outside spectacle of lights will be complete (and hopefully fabulous).
Every year I get super sick sometime in December. This has been going on for years and years no matter what I have been up to and no matter where I have lived. I have memories of me being a kid and being sick around the Holidays. There was “the calamari incident” where I attempted to eat the usual Christmas Eve calamari and spent Christmas morning over the toilet. I have not eaten calamari since. Then there was the “Disney World Disease” year (think this was 1998) where I had to leave a vacation at the World after a day because I needed to get home and to a doctor. I had pneumonia and was in the bed 10 days. I watched the ball drop lying on the couch covered in Vicks VapoRub and hot towels. And of course last year there was the “Nutcracker Pneumonia Incident” where the stress of my daughter being in the Nutcracker and the exposure to a slew of parents and kids lead to her bronchitis and my pneumonia.
I think I have naturally adapted to the December illness trend by getting things done early in the Holiday season. Usually all my decorating and shopping is done by December 1. This way, if I get sick, I am still ahead of the game. Also there is the added benefit of not wanting to eat the Holiday treats because the antibiotics make me really sick and this leads to potential Holiday weight loss. And I have a great excuse not to attend Holiday parties. So, there is a silver lining somewhere.
I am beginning to think my body gets sick at the end of the year because over the course of the year I am high energy and usually going pretty fast without much vacation time. So, I hit a wall much like the wall I hit daily around 3pm where I need a half cup of coffee to make it through the rest of the day. Maybe if the year were eleven months long I would be fine, because it is month twelve that gets me. Next year I have decided to set a goal of not getting really sick in December. To do that I must take more vacation time during the year-I am thinking at least two weeks. I am also going to work on getting better sleep which means going to bed before 11 and napping when I need it. I am going to take periodic breaks from working out so I can rest my body. I am going to be better at taking vitamins and eating well. My hope is that by doing all these things I will be well rested and my immune system will be able to fight off the December Uber-bug. In the end it is about pacing myself through the year so I have enough energy and reserves to see the finish line that is December 31, and not from the couch.
Keep Moving Forward,
Beth (BLOVI) Medlock
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