I’ve written before (many, many times) about the frustration at being unable to distinguish a really bad hay fever day from the early stages of a head cold. For a couple weeks the pollen count has been high or very high, so my hay fever has been pretty bad all of that time. By the middle of last week, in addition to the usual hay fever symptoms, I got two new ones the usually indicate more than just allergies are wrong: my blood sugar was suddenly all over the place, and I felt so thirsty that I couldn’t seem to get enough cold water in me. Either of those usually means that my immune system is fighting an actual bug, so I figured that I’d caught a cold, right?

Friday night/Saturday morning I could not stay asleep. I would wake up because I felt too hot and kicking off blankets hadn’t helped. Then after dozing for a while I wake up and felt like I was freezing. So Saturday morning I checked my blood sugar, took my morning meds, and laid back down to try to get some sleep. By late afternoon I felt a lot better. We showered and walked to a nearby restaurant where a friend’s band was playing and had a good time. I thought that if it had been a cold, I was actually getting over it.

Again, I had trouble sleeping the next night, but Sunday went a lot better.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning Monday I woke up with a much worse sinus headache than I had had in a long time. I was so out of it that I stood in the bathroom for a while staring at the clock and trying to remember when I had taken the last set of anti-histamines and such and whether I could take some more.

The upshot is that when my alarm went off in the morning, I did my blood sugar, took my prescription meds, took the over-the-counter allergy meds, called in sick, and crawled back into bed.

Today was the first time in nearly a week that my blood sugar was behaving. If it goes out of kilter because of a cold or flu (a very common problem for people with diabetes), it going back to normal usually means that the virus has run its course.

Today headache, congestion, and red itchy eyes are all usual hay fever symptoms, just much, much worse than normal.

So I don’t know what’s going on? Did I have a cold on top of the allergies? And then by random chance as the cold was subsidying something new bloomed and my sinuses had a melt down?

I don’t know. But please pass me another kleenex. Thanks.