Attitude of Gratitude

I think I’m allergic to Amsterdam. When living there for three years I got sick more often, for much longer, and more intensely than during the other thirty something years I’ve been on this earth. It should have been no surprise that when I came here for two weeks it would happen again.

It started as a cough and general achiness last Thursday - yes, over a week ago! I didn’t think too much of it at first, but it continued to get worse to the point that I could not attend practically any of the meetings I was here for this week. I became intimately familiar with my hotel room instead. I spent my time eating Dutch room service (which consisted of a watery vegetable broth which oddly reminded me of Cup-a-Soup) watching reruns of Knight Rider, and counting sheep.

That, and I coughed, hacked, and snotted my way through the week. My scratchy cough was continuous, keeping me and no doubt my neighbors at the hotel up all night long. Late at night as I would begin another coughing fit I would freeze in my tracks if I would hear their doors open, thinking perhaps they were going to come bang on my door and yell at me to shut up already!

And the congestion was a constant, with me feeling as if my head would explode at any moment. I was always under the impression that if you were blowing yellow goo out your nose that you were on the road to recovery. If that was the case then I should have been cured DAYS ago. Honestly, I’ve never seen one head produce so much snot. Mountains of tissues cover my floors each morning, and I have to carve a little footpath through them to get to my bathroom.

Last night I got an added bonus as well. After days and days of constant blowing, my raw nose decided it had had enough and I got a nose bleed in the middle of the night. It was sudden, right when I started another coughing fit, and it was like an overflowing volcano with nowhere to go but out because of the snot blockage. I could not get it to stop and finally had to take extreme measures and blow my nose to unclog everything, thus blowing blood all over the mirror and wall in the bathroom. Not pretty. But the blood then had somewhere to flow. Right down my throat.

I suppose I could have visited a doctor here, especially since you cannot get anything with antihistamines or decongestants over the counter. (That’s crazy! In what country are you not allowed to buy decongestants??) But I figured they would only tell me to “drink more fluids and take more rest” or eat more brown bread or something insane like that, so it would be a waste of money.

But my major regret of it all is that because of being so sick I did not get the chance to see many of my great friends in this wonderful city, and that makes the me the most sad. I feel like it was a wasted visit. But the good news is that I’m feeling much better finally. Just in time to leave.