And this year for my birthday…

Ever since my 16th birthday, when I spent the day at the ICU with my grandma, who was dying of lung cancer, my birthdays have sucked.  With two exceptions, they have sucked royally.

And this year is no different.

August 6, some of the K4 trainees came to my house for their Kampuchea Adventure.  I think they had a good time….I HOPE they did, anyway.  We kept it really low key and I gave them a chance to relax and just NOT do training stuff for a few days (not to mention the fact that my bones really hurt and I didn’t want to do stuff), and then I fed them spaghetti and macaroni and cheese—things I craved a LOT during training.  When they left on the morning of the 8th, I felt not so great but figured it was just fatigue from the new exercise class I’d started with my mom combined with the extra effort of playing hostess and translator all weekend.

BUT sometime in the middle of the night between the 8th and 9th I woke up with a fever of 103 (SURPRISE!!!) that wouldn’t go down below 100 no matter what medicine, or how much I took.  I also had a really nasty cough.  Three and a half days later, with no relief from the fever AT ALL (and one of the docs here saying, “just eat some soup, you’ll be fine.”) my host mom forced me to lay down with a block of ice on my head and one on my chest.  That helped a little, but by that time I was in so much pain that anything touching my skin made me sob uncontrollably.  

Today is August 12, my 27th birthday, and now on top of all the other stuff I’ve already written, I’m dealing with the fact that I have probably coughed my way into a hernia.  OH JOY. 

I don’t know what I will be doing for my birthday next year, but I’m guessing whatever it is will be great compared to this one.