Not Well

I've not been well. Nothing new there you're thinking. And that's true enough which is why I seldom bother writing about it here these days but I've had a bit of a time of it over the last couple of weeks.

It started with a few weeks of a developing migraine cluster. That in itself was unusual: the pattern for me in recent years has been for these to kick off when the clocks go back and then for it to get worse as the days get shorter, only really clearing in the spring. But here we were with the equinox approaching and I was getting migraines as often as two days out of three. Not good.

Then I started to feel more generally out of sorts and unwell. A day of feeling achy and then the most impressively bad cough. Really bad. It felt like my lungs were shutting down and I was coughing up a lot of phlegm. Luckily although I don't suffer from asthma I do have a Ventalin inhaler for another condition so I was using that. A lot. Even then I could hardly talk without breaking down in fits of coughing. Poor old Jack was only getting very short walks up Ely Road.

But it was still a struggle coping and in the end having lived with it for a couple of days I caved in and accepted Beth's offer of coming home a week early from researching WalkLakes as I didn't really feel up to walking Jack at all any more.

It wasn't getting any better by last Monday so although my suspicion was that this was a virus and I just had to ride it out we went to see the GP. She had a listen to my lungs and said that although she thought it problem was viral originally it sounded like it had gone microbial now so prescribed me a week long course of antibiotics.

I finished those yesterday.

So how am I now?

Well I've still got a cough, although it's a shadow of its former self, and I'm back taking topiramate in the hope that that might help with the migraines. I've been on that for two weeks now although only on full dose for a day and it takes a while before it came have any effect and, in truth, it's not been that effective in the past so I am slightly clutching at straws there.

Which means the virus/cough thing has been running for a couple of weeks and the migraine cluster for about six now.

I'm not impressed. This is the time of year when I'm normally starting to get well.