Hey you guys! How are things going? I just wanted to give you a little update. I wish I could say things have been rosy and perfect but unfortunately I’ve been pretty sick recently. In fact, this entire winter I have had a cold in one form or another. This is a problem for a person that does 5+ podcasts a week (this week I have 7!). Fortunately I have not lost my voice all together but it has been challenging. I was really bummed because this last weekend I was scheduled to go to the Tumbleweeds Film Festival but I was too sick. I managed to push through Sundance but since I had a cough this time I didn’t feel right about it. I think it is super rude to go to the movies if you know you will be hacking throughout it. Plus, I felt miserable so what’s the point?
It really has been a tough winter for me. I think part of it is the inversion has been very bad and that puts my sinuses at risk for infection and viruses. The worst thing is when you are coughing so hard that your chest starts to hurt and it feels like you can’t breath. I am also very mucusy and going through a box of tissues a day. My nose is raw and chafed from blowing it so much. Fortunately, my job has been super understanding and kind with helping me get better, which I am beyond grateful for. Even so, I wish I could take a weeks off to 100% get better and finally lick this infection.
I am just glad I don’t have kids because that would be so stressful while being sick. Plus, I’m glad there is Jamba Juice just a hop away. Caribbean Passion is my fav with immunity whenever I get sick. I also watched Happy Feet which is my traditional sick day movie (it’s dancing penguins. How can you be uncheered by that?)
Even while sick we have been plugging away at the Hallmarkies podcast and I’m very proud of our efforts. It’s entertaining, fun and people seem to really like it. Please check it out even if you don’t like Hallmark movies! (We are very charming. You don’t want to miss it)
This week’s winners post is a day late but I’ve been sick so you will have to give me a little bit of a leeway. In this new series I am going to be posting about things I think are winners! There is enough negativity out there, so let’s talk about what is positive whether it be movies, TV, books, food, friends, whatever!
Happy Birthday Megan!- My sister Megan has a birthday today and she has accomplished so much in the last year with the publication of her first book Finding Wild. She’s a great mother, friend, and sister.
Nothing is better when I’m sick than a Jamba Juice. They taste so good and feel so good on my sore throat. Thanks to my Mom for getting me one last week. Sometimes I think I could live off of Jamba Juice! My favorite flavor is Caribbean Passion.
If you haven’t caught The Crown on Netflix you really are missing out on one of the best shows ever made. Much heralded as the most expensive show ever produced for Netflix it lives up to the hype. The acting is tremendous and it is real human drama. My friend Tom and I have been talking about it and will finish our podcasts discussing the finale tonight!
It’s hard to have winners this week and not talk about the Patriot’s unlikely come from behind win at the Super Bowl. I do not follow football at all but even I was impressed with what they did. It is the season for underdogs in football and politics I guess!
I went to the new Intermountain Health Care Draper Clinic yesterday and was very impressed. Everything was clean and organized and I did not have to wait long to see the doctor. They got me my prescriptions and it was all very simple and easy. I will definitely be returning there.
I finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and LOVED it! What an inventive, charming, funny, wonderful novel. It hits nostalgia galore without leaning on that nostalgia and is sci-fi without being boring. It felt positive which is a real rarity for these types of novels. It does have some cussing but not enough to bother me. I rarely walk away feeling so positive about a novel as I did for Ready Player One. Now I just can’t wait for the Spielberg movie to come!
So there you go! The losers for this week are the witch hut against Betsy Devos, my flu, and the violent Berkeley protesters.
What about you? What are your winners for this last week? Share in the comments section below.
In the grand scheme of things there are probably a lot of people having worse weeks than I’ve had. That said, it’s been a bit rough.
Monday it all started with a bit of a stomach ache and a headache that would last me a good 3 days. The headache was so bad I kept rubbing the top of my head to the point where it is now chapped and red like a carpet burn.
Then later on Monday I started to get really nauseated. I finally couldn’t keep any food down and was just miserable all day into Tuesday. Thankfully my visiting teacher brought me some crackers and gatorade for Tuesday but it was a rough day. Plus, I had to miss going to a play at Hale Theater with my family.
Not to get too graphic but while I was sick things got even worse when retching I pulled a muscle in my back which is quite painful. Luckily by that point the headache had mostly gone away.
While all this was happening I still had work to do and things to take care of. Fortunately I film all my videos (for the most part) on Friday and Saturday so this week was all set, but I had other tasks that needed to be done. The worst of it is I have employee review on Monday. Not exactly my best week to proceed a review, but my boss and coworkers are so understanding and kind it won’t be a problem. Still, not perfect work week.
Anyway, yesterday I did get a break from the tough week and suffered the back pain to watch Eddie the Eagle. This was the perfect movie to watch after a tough week. It’s like Rudy or Cool Runnings- an underdog sports story that makes you want to cheer. I will write a review later on today and will post a link but it made me really happy. I needed that!
Do you have those bad weeks? Of course you do. We all do. It’s part of life and happens from time to time. Thankfully there is always tons to be grateful for and moments where life gives us a break.
I certainly hope you had a better week than I did. Here’s to much better weeks in the future!
Today I am sick. Coughing and coughing. I have to say it is at moments like these that I wish I had someone to take care of me. It might sound crazy to miss my Mother when I’m about to turn 35 but doesn’t everyone miss their mothers from time to time?
I think it is more than that. It is that sense of someone having your back and taking care of you when you are unwell. Most of us as adults, married or single, don’t have that. It is probably the part of childhood we all miss the most.
It makes sense when you think about it because we are taught to be independent and strong but when we are sick that facade is gone and we are back to being needy and in pain. Plus, I am usually very tired and worn out when I am sick.
I’m just grateful I don’t work in accounting any more so I can take the day off and get better. In accounting it didn’t matter how sick I was. I still had to work every day.
But I still do miss being taken care of. On my mission I used to have these fantasies about my Mother taking care of me. I was so tired and worn out the entire time that it was something I would dream about. Ha! Not that much has changed.
Can anyone relate to what I am talking about? Do you ever as an adult wish you could get taken care of?
Sorry I have let it go 5 days between posts. I’m never sure how that happens! At least this time I have an excuse. I’m afraid I have had a wicked virus and been quite sick. I don’t have the strongest immune system and it seems like every year or so I get a whopper of an illness. My whole family is not the strongest when it comes to our immune system. It is probably partly due to going 48 hours without sleep in New York City but it was worth it.
Some people are what I call high output people. They seem to be able to accomplish so much and do things like all nighters without it phasing them. I never could, even when I was in college. I’ve done all nighters by accident with my insomnia but that is a completely miserable experience and it is hard for me to function. What is amazing is people who can go, go, go without it wearing them down. I get sick every time. Oh well!
Luckily I have a job that I can easily do while sick and that’s a huge blessing. I also found a new doctor that is covered by my insurance and had a very positive experience. He prescribed me the biggest pills ever and seemed very attentive.
I did keep up my movie reviews so make sure to check out the movie blog including my review of the new Dreamworks film Home.I also have been doing some fun videos on the channel including a collaboration with an awesome youtuber from London and my favorite movies when I’m sick. If you aren’t subscribed to my movie blog and my channel please do. I think you will really enjoy the content and it will be worth your time.
So let’s hope I can kick this illness and be at the top of my game again. Hope you are all healthy and illness free.
So remember how I wrote about this being the ‘perfect Christmas’? Well, I had a feeling I was jinxing myself and I sure did. I had been dealing with a cough for a couple of weeks but then on Monday I really started to feel poorly. Enough so that I went to the doctor just in case it was an infection. Turns out it was a virus. No big surprise.
I was hoping it would just be a little thing but Tuesday (Christmas Eve) I wasn’t feeling great but I pushed through the day. My throat hurt and I just didn’t feel good. I got through the day and then stumbled home and crashed sleeping till 10 am. I felt pretty rotten but I went up to where my parents are staying and got my presents but I kept falling asleep (a bad sign. I never take naps unless I’m sick) and after about 12:30 I felt so bad I had to go home and spent the rest of Christmas Day in bed.
Then yesterday and today came with more time in bed and I still feel very rotten. I can’t talk, my throat hurts and I just feel awful. Thank you to my home teachers who gave me a blessing this morning and my friend Tanya who brought me dinner.
I hope this weekend I am able to improve. We will see. At least I have some time off work to heal.
Send out a prayer my way. Thanks. Thanks to my family for coming out here. I am soooo grateful to not be traveling with this sickness.
I remember the good old days when being sick meant chicken soup, movie watching, slurpees and my Mom reading me a story and giving me a hot towel to feel better…Sigh for those days are long ago. (I obviously had a great mother right!)
Working from home is a great blessing but I have a hard time really resting. I regularly suffer from insomnia and unfortunately this does not decrease when I am sick. I can’t seem to turn off all of the things left to do and it is so easy to do them, that far too often I do. I technically took 6 hours of vacation today but I should not have because I really worked all day. Sigh…
So here was my sick day. I woke up and worked solid until about 11. Then I was coughing so much I had to lie down.
Cough, cough, coughTrying to rest
I took some cold medicine and read my book club book Macbeth by Shakespeare (very enjoyable). I still felt antsy and couldn’t relax. I stopped an answered more emails, all which seemed immediate and I was grateful I had answered them. (That is my greatest problem. I am sure they could wait but in the moment it does not feel like they could).
I went to an insomnia specialist on Tuesday and we talked about my anxiety and struggles relaxing. She challenged me to turn off my cell phone for 4 hours. As she was saying it I grew involuntarily tense like she had put a spell on me. I was surprised by the strength of the response. She quickly said in alarm ‘we don’t have to do that right away…’. I want to work on this but not sure how. We’ll see. I will keep chipping away at it.
Anyway, I decided to make some soup for sick little old me. It was a lentil soup mix I had that required adding carrots, onions and celery. I was chopping the ingredients (I had all 3 from bountiful baskets) and cut my finger badly.
Poor sad finger
I was worried I would pass out when I cut it and my whole arm felt tingly. Luckily it healed up pretty good.
So then I tried to rest some more but I felt guilty for not checking the PO Box for Poler so I went out to get the mail. Nothing there. However, I used the chance to go and get my sick tradition- Slurpee (At least some things don’t change!).
Don’t worry sugar free
So now I will try to eat something tonight but I have no appetite when I’m sick. It is the one time I wish I had a roommate. Someone who could get me something tasty and comforting….Sigh.
I just hope can recover because there is far too much to do right now.
“Alas, the frailty is to blame, not we
For such as we are made of, such we be”
William Shakespeare Twelfth Night
So all week I’ve felt a cold coming on. I’ve had so much to do that I tried to ignore it. Getting back from a trip is stressful and there is still a great deal of work, cleaning and laundry to do. I haven’t even been up to the houses since I got back I’ve been so busy.
In an attempt to ward off illness I got a flu shot on Monday but sadly it was not the all-encompassing vaccination one hopes for because on Thursday I started to feel unwell. At first I thought it was just fatigue from all the training I’ve been doing. This Saturday (the 24th) I am swimming in my first swim meet in 13 years! I can’t wait! I am going to swim the 400, 200, and 50 free!
Unfortunately as Thursday went into Friday my sore throat got worse and my chest felt more congested. Nevertheless, I plowed through and did another swim Friday night. However, it was clear something was wrong because I could barely do a 200 m. My chest felt constricted and tight, like I couldn’t breath correctly. By the time I got home I felt the shivers and downright sick.
Yesterday I spent the entire day sleeping and resting and with some dayquil/nyquil got through the day. Luckily my sister Anna was already planning on using my apartment to cook her anniversary dinner with her boyfriend so she took care of me as well! She did my shopping and made me sushi. I tried to stay out of their hair but it was still nice to have the company.
Now today is Sunday and I am resting once again. I debated about going to the Urgent Care but I think I will wait and go to my regular doctor tomorrow if I am still not feeling well. I’m pretty sure it is just a lovely virus but its always worth checking if it goes on for multiple days. I just hope that it doesn’t keep me from training next week because I want to be ready for my swim meet. I also have limited time to prepare for my next open water swim Slam the Dam in Vegas on October 1st.
It’s a longer race (1.2 miles so longer by just a hair) so I need to train! Let’s just hope my body let’s me!
Sometimes I wish I had a stronger constitution- a body that withstood the virus’ and bacteria of the world. Sadly, it is not the case. If there is something going around I get it- and usually the more virulent strain of it. My entire family has somewhat weak constitutions, especially my brother who seems to always get unusual variations of an infection.
My cousin Julia never missed a single day of high school. Me on the other hand I was gone 1/3rd of the time. I just got sick more and my mother believed in keeping us home if we are sick. On a side note there is increasing evidence that we should all stay home when we are sick:
1. We are not productive employees when we are working sick. A recent study by the Harvard Business School shows that “Employers worry a lot about absenteeism, but new research suggests a bigger threat to productivity is “presenteeism”: sick workers who show up at work but are not fully functioning. U.S. companies may lose $150 billion (yes, that’s billion) annually because of presenteeism, according to some estimates.”
2. You are more likely to get sick from a co-worker/student that goes to work sick than most any other interaction. Think about it- you spend 8 hours a day in sometimes very close quarters with these people.
The New York Times says, “In a telephone survey of nearly 1,000 adults conducted by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, more than one-third of workers said they felt pressured to go to work when sick. About the same number reported that they had picked up the flu from a colleague in the workplace.”
“We work in a Dilbert environment these days,” said Brett Gorovsky, an analyst at Wolters Kluwer. “We’re in closed office spaces, where germs are a bigger concern. And there’s downsizing. There are fewer people to backfill now, so workers more often feel they have to show up.”
Recently in Utah there was a measles scare and the CDC had to remind everyone that if your child is sick keep them home. We are losing our herd immunity as a society because of those that chose to not vaccinate their children (that’s a topic for another entry. A topic I feel quite strongly about- immunize your kids!). This means we are all more susceptible to serious infections and can transport those infections to others. Even conditions like measles, whooping cough, and mumps that were at one time thought eradicated are springing up all over the place. If we ever get a truly deadly pandemic we will need to have developed the habit of isolating the sick or the effects will be terrible.
This movie looks really good but kind of freaks me out.
Again from New York Times, “In one case, more than 1,000 people were sickened with a gastrointestinal virus at a casino in Reno, Nev., in an outbreak that began with a few sick employees who said their supervisors had pressured them to go to work. The employees, mostly low wage earners, had little or no paid sick leave.”
3. Disease transmission aside, with rest you are more likely to recover quickly. I personally would rather have 1 or 2 days in bed than have 2 weeks of a lingering illness.
Anyway, if you are sick STAY HOME!
Today I will be following my own good advice and am sticking to my apartment. Here’s to hoping I feel better tomorrow!
Btw, the only time I wish I didn’t live alone is when I am sick but I think that is mostly because I wish for someone to complain to and someone to do my shopping. One time I told my sister “I wish I was married and could have someone to take care of me when I am sick”. She said “Well, that really doesn’t happen when you are married. What you want is a mother”. It’s true.
I guess that’s proof that no matter how independent we feel, each of us at one point or another yearns for our mothers…
So, I have no energy to write a long note. I just wanted to explain why it had been weeks since my last post. I was away in California and despite the joy of seeing my family, it was a bit of a doomed trip. There was one problem after another culminating by getting the flu on Friday. Some how I made it back and have been going through one of the worst illnesses of my life. I’m not exaggerating. My throat hurt SO bad. I couldn’t breath, sleep or do anything else without severe pain. I also had huge body aches with horrible fevers and chills. Today is my first day that I felt some healing. I still have a sore throat but not as bad as this weekend.
What does being this sick make a girl realize? Well, a few things:
1. There is nothing on TV during the day.
2. Following up on that, a DVD library really comes in handy during moments like these
3. When you can’t eat anything, everything looks delicious.
4. Being sick makes you grateful for little things like the ability to swallow, control your body temperature, and sleep regularly.
5. I have the BEST friends and family! Thank you especially to Jim for picking up the slack as I’ve been sick, for Emilee Russell, Suzanna Graff, and Bonnie Denison bringing me groceries/medicine, and all the get well texts/calls/and messages
6. Thank you to Sister Tait for taking me to the doctors on Friday. If there was even a sliver of a chance I could have taken an antibiotic I was going to pursue that option. I really appreciate her helping me.
7. I’m thankful for Brother Van Hoff, Spencer and Ben for giving me a blessing Sunday. I am so grateful for the power of God in my life and for worthy friends who are willing to serve.
8. Its amazing how with all the medical technology we have that there is no real treatment for illnesses like the one I have. You just have to wait it out like in the old days.
9. I am so grateful my body has begun to heal.
10. If anyone needs cough drops, lozenges, sore throat spray, or a variety of other meds…I’m your girl!
Here’s to getting better!
ps. When everything was going bad on my trip I kept saying it could be worse…I’ve stopped saying that!
pps. Today I watched my Carey Grant movie collection. He is the best! His Girl Friday may be my new favorite movie. I’d seen it before, but it made me smile extra wide this time, which given the circumstances was tough to do.
So today I woke up with a sore throat. It’s a cold with a cough but still not my favorite thing! Everything is a little cloudy so I won’t write long. I just wanted to write this one question to the crowd. Lately I’ve been doing so well with the exercising and eating right. Suppose I get sick for a week. In the past such an event has ruined my attempt to get in shape. How do each of you stay committed to your fitness regiment while you are recovering from illness? How do you know when you are ready to push yourself and begin exercising again? I am hoping that by resting today and more tomorrow I will be able to exercise Tuesday even if it is for just a little bit.
Tomorrow is my recital that I’ve been working for. I’m nervous that I won’t be able to perform. The only thing that I have to hope for is that the song I am singing is Adelaide’s lament from Guys and Dolls. This song is perfect because Adelaide is sick when she is singing it. The song is about how because her man Nathan Detroit won’t commit Adelaide is getting sick. It is supposed to be done in a squeaky New York accent. I’m not great at it but I have come a long way. Here is a recording of me singing the song. Please be gentle in your critiques. A few of the notes aren’t perfect but I’m working on it. One of the hard things about singing is there is so much to concentrate on- pitch, tone, words, acting, diction, vocal dynamics, correct breathing, posture etc. At least I can honestly say I am improving particularly in my belty tone.
You won’t get the full effect of the performance by just the vocals. I plan on wearing my fluffy bathrobe and having a box of tissues in my hands. Plus I always get lots of praise for my acting ability in recitals. I wish I could preform in a real play again (haven’t been in one since high school) but it hasn’t worked out yet. The local plays in Utah are so darn competitive and I get super nervous in auditions (although I haven’t done one since high school so perhaps I am better at them now? Who knows?) Let’s just hope I am feeling well enough to be in the recital. I will update the blog tomorrow to share with you what happens.
Here’s the original broadway version of the song. Like I said, I know I have a long way to go but I am improving!
Hey you guys! How are things going? I just wanted to give you a little update. I wish I could say things have been rosy and perfect but unfortunately I’ve been pretty sick recently. In fact, this entire winter I have had a cold in one form or another. This is a problem for a person that does 5+ podcasts a week (this week I have 7!). Fortunately I have not lost my voice all together but it has been challenging. I was really bummed because this last weekend I was scheduled to go to the Tumbleweeds Film Festival but I was too sick. I managed to push through Sundance but since I had a cough this time I didn’t feel right about it. I think it is super rude to go to the movies if you know you will be hacking throughout it. Plus, I felt miserable so what’s the point?
Rachel's Musings 