Not earth-shattering news but I slept well last night. The medication was effective at suppressing the cough, and I’m still only at day 1. Tests start on day 7 to discover root cause.
A revealing moment as I was making coffee just then was how I processed the improvement. I have long standing plans for the next 3 days meeting people I care about and who care about me. In the last 72 hours or so I wasn’t sure I was going to keep those commitments, so I let them know I wasn’t.
This morning, feeling rested (& seeming fit), I began wondering if I could keep them after all. I continued to extrapolate – if I’m already feeling better on day 1, and the symptoms disappear, do I really need to do the tests?
The kettle was boiling, and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. Of course not doing the tests is entirely the wrong thing to do. Merely because the symptoms have been subdued with drugs whose names sound like the mafia (Panafcortelone, really!) doesn’t explain why I keep having these episodes every so often, and that lays me low for weeks at a time every two years or so.
Short-term day-dreaming taking over long-term decisions.
The better thing to do is to try to get to the cause, even though it is expensive, takes time, and requires effort. Of course I will. I’ve learnt that expensive lesson in the last 3 decades of my life.
My reflection from this anecdote: daydream all you want, but remember to take time to think through decisions about the most important things. It’s not usually life and death.
And if it is, I’ll know, and decide accordingly.
The coffee tasted so much better too 🙂