Battery Status: 5 %

First of all: Merry Christmas, if you are celebrating!

I am semi-alive again, but the past few days I truly felt awful. I guess I had jinxed it by telling everyone left right and centre that my immune system was pretty much the strongest imaginable and that I had perfected warding off an imminent cold with an army of various remedies over the years. Well...
When I worked at the Firm, my second-to-last (and favourite) manager inevitably got sick with the flu or at least a common cold over Christmas after having flown around half the globe and attended many events the weeks before. I don't know if he still follows that pattern - I hope not, for his sake - but now I can certainly relate more than I did before.

Last Wednesday, the day before our office Christmas party, which I had been looking forward to for moths, I started feeling a bit under the weather but enlisted all my little helpers. In vain, as it turned out. Just as we had scored a great table at the party venue (with literally, thousands of colleagues) and the buffet stations were opened, I felt all energy drained out of me and I did not even feel hungry any more. My throat was sore and I felt frozen to the core. I did not feel like small talk, either, but "thankfully" Bestie Boy, who was sitting next to me, was pretty much in the same situation, dealing with sinusitis, and we ended up pulling a Polish Exit well before 10 p.m. I ran a bath and went to bed, shivering under a layer of 2 duvets. So much about my plans of dancing all night and after-partying...

What's worse, I had spared no time and expense and even dashed to a hairdresser's near the office in my lunch-break on Thursday for a wash and blow dry...with the unexpected and rather painful side effect that my right temple got burnt from a curling brush the metal ends of which had become incredibly hot from the hairdryer. What developed into a lovely, but pretty invisible blister the same night has since become a nice wound that I have been treating with antiseptic cream. Another déjà vu here: at Coma HQ I shared my room with a very eccentric Japanese lady who wanted to get rid of a spot of dark pigmentation on one of her cheeks by means of citric acid and the rough part of a scouring sponge. She ended up producing a gaping hole in her face that had people look away in horror. Mine is not quite as bad, but somehow rather reminiscent. Thankfully, it can be hidden behind hair at least.

As I had Friday off (originally planned to be able to sleep in and recover from wild partying) I seized the day to lick my wounds and take it easy. I truly felt as if I had been run over by a truck, with joint pains and all the usual signs of a beastly cold. After not having been sick all year despite being exposed to extreme climate changes and long-distance flights with people all around me who were coughing and sneezing their guts out, it hit me full force.

While I'm SO not the esoteric kind who likes to search for a psychological cause for every ailment, I do believe that my defences had been down because I had been in denial about different stress factors in my life that had been bugging me for a while. I had also taken down my pent up frustrations on the wrong person with a "showdown" on Thursday afternoon and felt truly horrible about it. Essentially, my batteries were flat and I needed this unpleasant reminder to stop pretending that I am invincible.