A Much Needed Life Update
Hello Hello! Thanks to flu-mageddon this is my first blog post in over a month, and honestly I’ve got a lot to catch you up on. My blog posts aren’t usually centered around me and my life per se, but there has been a few things up in the air lately that I’m sure have been a bit confusing. So, if you fancy a chat, perhaps grab a cup of tea or coffee, and let's dive in. <3
Let’s start with the beginning shall we? Toward the middle of April I started feeling under the weather on a random Monday night. I didn’t think much of it, and went to sleep. I woke up the next day sick with what I would call a pretty severe head-cold. I rolled my eyes at the inconvenience, took some advil, and went about my day. (Sadly sicks days aren’t really a thing as a college student). It lasted longer than I thought it would. After about 7 days it began to let up and I felt myself getting better. I had about two days of normal health, during which I celebrated my 21st birthday by eating cookie cake and watching The Office.
The morning after my birthday, I woke up sick as a dog. And before you say hangover, I was not drinking the night before on account of still healing from the nasty head cold. I was flabbergasted - I didn’t understand how I could be sick again 48 hours after a pretty nasty bout. I thought maybe it was a minor relapse of the original sickness, but sadly it was a whole different animal.
What followed was two weeks of what i can only describe as the most sick I’ve ever been. High fevers, intense muscle spasms, nausea, etc. I basically was confined to my bed, as even standing for a few minutes made me light-headed. I was taking the highest possible doses of various medicines and nothing even put a dent in my symptoms. It was one of those seminal sicknesses that I know I will never forget - one of those that for a long time after I shudder to thing about. I couldn’t drive or even cook myself food. I am so grateful I had Austin to help me with the basics.
This, of course, overlapped with final exams. I did my best to hydrate (god bless pedialyte), and sat my exams with a brain swimming in fever. I did fine, my grades survived, but at this point I wasn’t so worried about my grades as I was my ability to heal. By then my body had been severely ill for almost three weeks (those two days in the middle the exception), and I was concerned that it didn’t have any “gas” left. I was scared, and I considered checking myself into the ER. But I made one final push and drove the few hours home to my parent’s house when final exams finished.
Three delirious days later, my fever broke. I ended up needing antibiotics for a sinus infection that had developed, but by mid-may I was at least sentient again. I don’t actually know what “got me” so good. I tested negative for covid and strep. I’m sure it was just some random virus that latched on and wouldn’t let go.
Even now in early June I can still feel the toll those few weeks took on me physically. I have been slowly nourishing and strengthening myself. Lots of water, walks, and low impact exercise like pilates and yoga.
For reasons I won’t go into too much detail about, I had some severe health issues growing up. For a large portion of my childhood I was sick or healing from being sick. Because of this, one of the earliest lessons I learned was to never take my health for granted. To feel gratitude when I could take a full unencumbered breath, or run and keep up with my friends. These three weeks were a harsh and somewhere traumatic reminder of those ill moments in my childhood. But I am more appreciative than ever of what it means to be healthy.
Now for the big whammy - you may remember back in March/April I was hinting at some big changes coming up, and how I was struggling with their implications. I didn’t want to share until it was confirmed, But Austin is leaving for another city, and we will be going back to long distance until I graduate in May.
For those of you that don’t know, for the first year and a half of my time in college Austin and I were long distance. This was at my old univeristy, and I have distinct memories of being unhappy during that phase of my life. Yes, long distance was incredibly hard, but also that university was absolutely destroying my mental health. Long story short I transferred. The school I transferred to has everything I was looking for, and Austin, so really I killed two birds with one stone. (I cover my whole transfer story in this YouTube video).
Anyway, flash back to now. Austin and I have been enjoying our five minute walk proximity and honestly just living the life. But as time went on, it became abunantly clear that, ironically, this university wasn’t the right place for him. Long story short, Austin’s physics major led him to a love for engineering, and our school has no engineering program. If he wanted to study engineering, he had to go somewhere else.
So, that led us to where we are now. He’ll be starting at a different school this fall, while I return and finish out my senior year. It will be about nine months of long distance (hello nine hour drive between us :’( ). When I graduate in May I’ll be joining him in his new city.
This decision was very last minute, and it quite literally went from having the whole next two years planned out one week, to our plans being completely flipped upside down the next. (What’s that saying? “We plan and God laughs”?)
It took me a few weeks to really come to terms with everything this meant. Austin is my best friend. We’re coming up on 4 years together, and we already did 1.5 of those long distance. I did a good bit of crying and processing and mourning the loss of that time together. But eventually I came to recognize this for the good that it is - an opportunity for the person I love to go study the thing he loves. It will involve some lonely moments, but at the end we’ll be all the more grateful to be together again.
So if I’ve seemed weird lately, there are the two major reasons why. But I’m healing physically, and mentally I’m feeling ready to take on my *solo era*. Thank you for hanging with me, especially during that god-awful flu-mageddon. Onward and upward my friends!