The Christmas Plague

I love teaching; there are very few jobs where you can have Christmas and New Years off and all the days in between. The trade off of course is that when you are teaching the rest of the year you do not have a life.
I have been working myself too hard in December. It seems for me work doubles when I am preparing for time off, you know tying up loose ends, grading everything and so on. So naturally when I have some down time I get sick, almost no fail. I started feeling unwell Saturday the 24th and by Christmas I got full blown sick, coughing, feeling like you cannot breathe because you are so congested, ears clogged, sinuses hurting because you are stuffed up.
I should have known something was coming up when my ears felt like something were inside them on Wednesday the 20th. As usual I went on, and kept going on and on.
My parents arrived Friday Dec 23rd, of course Ahmie and I spent all day cleaning preparing for my parents visit. It was not too bad mess wise, we are settling in our apartment and much of our things have a place. They came on Greyhound and arrived about 7 in the morning, I picked them up and showed them a little bit of Cleveland, and where I work. Liam slept in that morning and Ahmie and I got a chance to chat with my parents, which was nice, and Liam had a chance to sleep well and greeted his grandparents (nai-nai, and yeh-yeh) with bright eyes and full of cheer. It has been several months since Liam has seen them. Later that day we went out for Dim sum at C & Y Chinese restaurant. We also invited our friends from church Serena, Jasmine (who returned from her first semester at college), Carlos and Sharon (Serena's parents). The food was wonderful; it was interesting having dim sum with two vegetarians. They do have some excellent dim-sum dishes for vegetarians. Afterwards we did some shopping for Asian goods.

We decided to lay low for the rest of Friday and Saturday to have a nice dinner, relax and enjoy each other's company. Saturday night we attended the Christmas Eve service at Westshore. Saturday night we enjoyed a delicious turkey (which started the week of turkey leftovers, turkey soup, turkey lo-mien, turkey fried rice and so on). Sunday we opened our Christmas gifts before church. I started feeling unwell Sunday morning, my throat started getting horse before church, however I was convinced to do a reading that morning and apparently I did some justice to the piece even though my voice was a little horse. I got to feeling really unwell Sunday afternoon, I had to sleep a little bit and I really felt sick.
I felt unwell until Wednesday, which meant I could not participate in the usual after Christmas bonanza of clearance deals, probably a good thing. Of course Wednesday was when I went to see my doctor. The doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and a steroid/broncodialator for my cold and chest congestion. I started feeling better almost right away.


Starting Thursday I worked on scanning in some family documents for my Dad. By then everyone at the apartment was feeling a little under the weather except my Mom. Ahmie and Liam had a bit of a cough, and dad was coughing also. None of them got as bad as I did.


My parents returned to New York on Sunday night and it was a very long but enjoyable visit from my parents.