Ug. Ill.

Thanks to Janus I've been struggling with a nasty cough and cold of late. Last night it reached - I hope - its zenith and left me with a temperature of 101.7F. Luckily it rapidly dropped, and this morning I've got no temperature whatsoever. My lungs are still awful, crackling away with each breath, and my throat 'thing' remains despite there being no inkling of stress on the horizon at all. Very strange. I've done a lot of reading about it, and it's called 'globus sensation' or, my preference, 'globus hystericus'. Nobody understands it, nobody can cure it, and most of the people who suffer from it say it comes and goes. One poor chap had it for 9 years. 9 years! And it was so bad he would suffer from not being able to breathe. Crumbs. I'm not that bad.

I'm on omeprazole at the moment, but the ENT specialist put me on Nexium. They're both roughly the same thing. Nexium deals in esomeprazole, and from a journal I read it seems like Nexium might be the more potent of the two. Now, I've definitely had some indigestion while on the omeprazole, so I'm thinking that going back to the Nexium might be a smart plan. After all, the throat thing did clear up when I took Nexium, and even if the whole thing is psychosomatic then going on the drug that 'worked' before might trick my brain. Will it make a difference to my brain that it knows I'm on to it? But if it's the subconscious part, will it know I'm on to it? Does the subconscious listen to the conscious? Voluntary/involuntary communication? Tricky one ...

Also, I'd like to point out that, despite my body's demands to the contrary, I'm really not a person of nervous disposition. I'm not a hypochondriac. I find the workings of the body and the mind quite fascinating, so I tend to like to talk about aches and pains, and weird stuff that happens ... but I recognise this isn't particularly fascinating to everyone. I like to think that if I understand how something works, I'll then understand how it's gone wrong and therefore how I can fix it. Unfortunately, psychosomatic things don't work that way. If this throat thing, like psycho-tummy, is brought on by stress then you'd think it would go away in times of relaxation. However, I definitely remember times when there was no stress on the horizon and yet I was lying on the sofa, shaking from head to foot and feeling awful. Now I've got an entire year of no plans stretching before me, I could do absolutely nothing if I wanted to - and the throat thing is a permanent fixture.

Baffling. I don't get it.

Still, I will wait until my cold has 100% vanished, along with the unpleasant post-nasal drip (an oh-so-charming expression, n'est ce pas?), before taking stock of the throat situation. Then I'll go back to the doc and get back on Nexium and see if that makes a difference. If all that fails ... well, I suppose I'll see if the doctor can come up with something. If, as someone suggests, it's actually my oesophagus going into spasm, then I could suggest some muscle relaxants to see if they actually make a difference.

I'm not crazy, but I might be soon if this weird 'something stuck in my throat' sensation doesn't fuck off and leave me alone.

On an aside - I think I became iller because I decided to go for a run and a swim the day before yesterday. Ok, it was only a mile's run, but breathing out was incredibly unpleasant - horrible crackles that coughing couldn't clear - and at the end of it, and not to put too fine a point on it - it felt like my womb was trying to climb out of my body. Hey ho - it's not like I need it anyway. In medieval times physicians believed the womb moved about the body - called the 'wandering womb' - and after the run, I could have believed them. Even though they were clearly idiots. The swim was much less uncomfortable and I managed 80 lengths of front crawl (1360m) - although I had to pause to cough at about the midway point. I felt pretty good about it all - but then came the fever the next day, which suggests to me that going for a swim in a public pool when your immune system is shot to shite is not a very good idea.

Took the pooches for a wander up the road today, and both are much happier because of it. We've also had the drain men round and they've unblocked two of the other drains, which means everything should flow much more easily now. We were told, charmingly, by Mr Drain Man that a sure fire way of screwing up a sceptic tank system is to put 'white mice' down it.

"White mice?" I snorted to Fisher, when she relayed this. "You don't get white mice in ... ahhhh! Those white mice."

Sometimes I can be slow.