sick . . . again

I have been sleeping most of the day (two days, as I'm making this entry), spending also a significant amount of time blowing my nose and reading a rather menacing Agatha Christie novel, in which students all over the world rise up to become armies called Golden Youth and disguise bloodthirst as hippie culture. The hero is an eccentric young British gentleman with bad taste in clothes. Not one of her better works.

I’m not quite sure what I have. A host sister is in the process of trying to find out how and when my feet got wet, since these symptoms are obviously those of feet which have been wet. My face doesn’t look sick, and I taught three classes today, rather perkily, even, before I snapped out of some kind of trance and found myself leaning heavily on the desk, urgently needing a nap. I’m really disconnected. I’ll wake up from what isn’t exactly sleeping and realize that my head is tilted, mouth open and that I haven’t blinked for a long time. Maybe a couple hours. I haven’t really been breathing enough, either. But that’s another issue. I came home and sat for a while, then kind of tipped over sideways onto the bed. I usually put the bed back into its loveseat alter ego, but I thought something like this might happen when I left this morning.

The bed looks well-used by now, since when I sleep, I burrow [somebody – is “aaah! It’s burrowing! “– what is this from? Is it a Clare quote?], and often end up stuffing my pillow into the gap at the head-end, which troubles my dreams. I have been dreaming about the ninth graders, again. All day. I also somehow twist all the sheets around my feet, then kick them off. I wake up, mildly troubled. I think I will go to bed soon. I’m trying to make arrangements to facilitate breathing. I have a system for changing what I look at, which involves closing my eyes and turning my neck, then opening my eyes slowly.

Today, Wednesday, I feel much better and the lump between my jaw and my neck has subsided. However, my knees are a bit unpredictable and I find myself lurching quite a bit. I rather foggily taught my two morning classes, and now I will go and sleep again.