32. The side effects are starting

Last night I had a bit of a tight chest and I wondered if I had either picked up a germ in and out the hospital, although I seem to be the only one there wearing a mask :( and carry hand sanitiser etc. But also I am aware a few times I have sort coughed and regurgitated when I've been drinking, so started having a bit of a freak out about aspirated pneumonia :(

But with rest and fluids ( without choking) I seemed to feel a bit better by the time I went to sleep. In the middle of the night however I woke up and my mouth, which over the past 3-4 days has felt increasingly 'wooly' at the back and in the area or my jaw hinges both sides and where my tonsils would have been felt like it had been in a dehydrator for a few hours! The roof of my mouth was totally dry and almost shrivelled, not painful but very unpleasant. I went for a wee and whilst doing so endeavoured to summon up some spit and swoosh round my mouth rubbing it up into the roof of my mouth with my tongue but even then it still felt like it had been shrivelled and although now a little moist, was like some ones skin who had laid out in the sun all day and expected a small covering of after sun to resolve the damage :S I reached for the trusty benzydamine mouth wash and stood gargling and swooshing for all I was worth.

So its starting!

I went back to bed and tried to close my eyes and not think about how bad things might be by the morning.

I think that's one of the biggest issues for me, the not knowing, I go to sleep every night not knowing how bad my body is going to be doing by the morning. Its like the times you go to bed after feeling like you have something coming like a cold or flu, you've felt semi like shit all day and you feel something insidiously lurking in the background, and you go to bed thinking, I'm going to go to sleep and by morning a good rest is going to have kicked its arse, or I am going to wake up feeling full on rubbish. Until the moment you open your eyes you are never sure which its going to be. Luckily, normally in that situation I can just stay in bed, and think oh well that's me out of it for 2-3 days, but now that's not an option I will have to get up and get on however bad I get.

So far every night when I've gone to bed worried that anything I'm feeling is going to escalate, I've woken and thought 'oh not as bad as I thought' and still been able to get through another day, another journey, another treatment one way or another.

This morning my mouth is a bit weird but nothing I can't cope round. I ate toast, I drank a cup of tea ( although its starting to burn a little bit now when its still hot) and so far I have no journey anxiety. So Day 9 is upon me. Tomorrow.....double figures, and a third of the way through treatment ...woohoo. sadly after the end of this week is normally when all the fun starts.

I am going to book some hospital transport in readiness for that. I can always cancel it if I still feel like I can do it on my own. But the longer I don't need anyone the better. Call it training for next year.