Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been really sick. I’ve coughed, I’ve wheezed, I even lost my voice for about 5 days. No matter what medicine I take, nothing works. Until about 10 days ago, in the wee hours of the morning when I just couldn’t stop coughing. And then I remembered – I have a kid that coughs and wheezes constantly…I need to do what she does. And so I had the brilliant idea of using Greenleigh’s nebulizer with a little Albuterol.
And it worked. Oh so well. After hours of coughing, I fell fast asleep from 4am to 7am. Not terribly long, but without a doubt, the best sleep I’d gotten in a while. All it took was 15 minutes hooked up to the nebulizer.
The next night, I decided to be proactive and do the nebulizer treatment 30 minutes before I was going to bed, but it didn’t work. Around 4 am I woke up coughing to the point that I couldn’t stop. And so I ventured back to the bathroom to give myself a nebulizer treatment. Night after night, this trend continued. The most restful sleep in the world was waiting for me on the other side of those 15 minutes on the nebulizer.
For the first day or two, I enjoyed the peace and quiet in the house at 4 am when I did my nebulizer treatments in my dimly lit bathroom, but it became boring pretty quickly. Then those 15 minutes seemed to last forever. So on day 3 or 4, I grabbed my phone and started to surf the web while I did my treatments. The next day, I grabbed my laptop.
Suddenly, I had 15 minutes of complete quiet to work. And I was remarkably efficient. I responded to emails, caught up on facebook, and even started writing a blog post or two. Where I can normally respond to 1 email, I was responding to 3. Mainly because I had no time to mess around at 4 am. Emails were answered with a “yes” or a “no”, instead of long sentences with floral-ly, polite language. And then, once the treatment was over, I would fall back into bed and sleep oh so well. Something in that Albuterol must be magic.
Funny thing is, I’ve never been a morning person. I hate the idea of getting up early and tackling the day. I need to be eased into the day…slowly. But this time at 4 am wasn’t really morning. I got to go back to bed. It was like a sleep intermission, only for me to enter the next day with a jump start. It was a great thing.
But now, it appears that the Albuterol treatments have worked…a little too well. The last 2 nights, I’ve completely slept through my 4 am nebulizer sessions. I no longer have that 15 minute head start that I’ve been getting for a little over a week. And as a result, I’m now behind on my blog posts, my email is overflowing, and I haven’t checked Facebook since this morning.
At this point, I don’t know whether to be happy that I’m finally getting better or sad that I’ve lost my most productive time of the day. Either way, don’t expect an email from me at 4 am.
