The air goes in; the air goes out, and with it (both ways!) goes a sickly ripple of phlegm in the throat.

Our house is afflicted with the plague again. Seems like I write this post every year. This year feels worst of all, though that can probably be blamed on poor memory.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The kids are in day care, after all, which is basically a petri dish incubated at a biologically-friendly temperature for the entire year. Sort of like the opposite of the CDC. Instead of cataloguing germs for study and treatment, the day care simply cultivates the germs for dissemination on an unwitting populace.

All that means that for the last six weeks, at least one person in our house has had some form of cough/runny nose/sinus infection/sore throat. And for the past two weeks, we’ve all had it. Kids have been to the doctor, but my wife and I haven’t. She because every time she goes to the doctor, the doctor tells her she has a sinus infection. (She could go in with foot pain and be diagnosed with a sinus infection, I’m pretty sure.) Me because I’m a red-blooded American male, and we don’t go to doctors unless body parts need re-attaching.

I hate to complain about being sick. Any runner will develop a healthy (or actually, pretty unhealthy, come to think of it) ability to fight through pain, but whatever germ we’ve got keeps going and going. The Energizer Bunny of Pestilence. It’s become impossible to ignore.

First it was just a nagging cough. Then the cough got some static in it and migrated down into the chest. Then there was a little rattle at the end of each and every breath that won’t dislodge no matter how many coughs I cough. Now it’s a headache that settles in after lunch and hangs around like that one friend at the party until you give up and go to sleep.

Is it just a super bug we’ve contracted? Probably not. The body influences the mind influences the body, and it’s been a stressful month. The loss of my recent writing. The culmination of the one-act play we’ve been rehearsing at school for several months (ask anybody in theater what the best/worst time in the life cycle of a production is, and they will tell you it’s the last week — and that was last week for us). The not being at home due to all the work on said play.

I was sick going into all that, and then I went through all that, and I’ve only gotten sicker.

Thankfully, the stress is abating. We take our play in for competition today, so the pressure of improving it is over. And the novel has begun generating its own momentum again, so my daily writing is fully back on track. So maybe, maybe, just maybe the phlegm-lacquer coating all my breathing parts will start to crack as well.

Just in time for the kids to bring home a stomach virus from day care, no doubt.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.