This week is not going at all as expected. Midday Monday I noticed that my throat felt a little scratchy and I seemed to be more distractible than usual. I coughed a bit later in the day, but it didn’t feel like anything serious. When I clocked out and left the office I did my usual thing, which is to launch an open-ended walk on my workout app then walk semi-randomly until I’d logged a mile. Because of the geography of the part of town my office is in, it isn’t that random. First I go uphill three blocks (because it is a very steep hill between the office’s street and the street where the nearest bus stops are), then I start the semi-random bit. At most corners I choose which way to go based on which crosswalk shows “Walk” then continue down that block until the next corner. If I get too many blocks away from the bus stop, rather than cross the street, I turn the corner and walk 3/4s of the way around the block to get me headed back, then start crossing streets based on the cross-walk sign. Then, when my watch taps my wrist and dings to tell me I’ve gone a mile, I take the quickest route from that point to the bus stop.

I do this because for years one important source of exercise was that I would walk all the way home from downtown on most workdays. When I lived in Ballard, that meant walking for a bit over an hour four or five times a week, right. Now that I’m in Shoreline the walk is closer to 10 miles and much of it would not be along pedestrian-friendly routes. So I do this walking thing that usually gets me a bit over 25 minutes of walking each day.

Anyway, on Monday the first problem was that I was wheezing more than a bit on the steep uphill part and coughed for a while. Later, when my watch binged to indicate a mile I continued to the corner, stopped, looked around, and literally muttered, “Where the heck am I?”

Instead of looping back when I reached certain streets as I usually do, I had just let the random crosswalk signs guide me. And I wasn’t really anywhere that I didn’t know—it was just that I was at a part of downtown that I haven’t walked through in many years, back when I worked at a different workplace. And businesses have been replaced and some buildings have been torn down and I had to look at the street signs to figure out where I was, instead of recognizing my surroundings. So then I turned around and made as short a walk back to the bus stop as I could.

That should have been a sign. But even when I got home and my husband told me he was afraid he was coming down with something, and I confessed to being a bit worried about the scratchy throat and cough, I still clung to the notion that it was just worse than usual hay fever because we’d gotten a shift in the weather on Sunday.

A couple hours before my alarm went off Tuesday morning, I woke myself up having a coughing fit. There were other symptoms the made it clear I had caught something. Once my alarm did go off, I did my usual morning meds, then logged in to the work system to send my boss a message that I was sick and wasn’t sure I’d be up to working from home. There were already messages from co-workers who were sick and not coming in. I crawled back into bed and for all intents and purposes slept through the rest of the day. Yeah, I woke up a few times to eat, run to the bathroom, chat with my husband when he got home, and even make dinner (if heating two frozen prepared things from counts as making), but mostly I just slept.

I had hoped to wake up feeling better and only having to decide whether to try to go into the office or work from home (so as to decrease the chances of infecting other people). But I felt much worse when I woke up than I had yesterday.

Napping, cold tablets, and coffee seem to have alleviated the symptoms a bit. Since I’ve woken up enough to bang out a silly blog post, I think I might be able to be productive this afternoon, so guess it’s time to give that a go.