Fighting with myself

Weeks 25-26: Despite having a flu shot the month before, I have some kind of a bad cold or a mild flu that has me coughing incessantly. Sadly, I am Forbidden (again) from many familiar remedies, and Spouse spent some time stalking the obscure back corners of the pharmacy to find drugs from the Allowed list that might provide some relief. (It got bad enough that I had to sleep on the couch where I could prop myself nearly vertical and thus weather some of the phlegmy assaults and coughing fits. meh.) No fever or nausea, but I do have my usual sickness-related decline in appetite, so Speck had to make due with a trickle of bullion, juice, and tea for the worst of it while my feeble immune system tried to get the upper hand.

Pregnancy-specific aspects of this suffering period include not only concerns about my diet (although I've put on enough stores already that I'm sure there was no fetal starvation threatened) but the war between my need to minimize coughing and my desire to minimize heartburn: for example, milk helps with the latter but makes the former worse, and the reverse for, say, lemon tea... Also, night coughing means getting more and more tired, just when I could really use some reserves for the ongoing paint battle, etc., and sometimes I can't get quite a deep enough breath to really get the job done. The only good thing about the timing of all this was that my depleted sick days were somewhat spared because I had already taken off one day in the worst part (for Election Day, which I barely worked) and had planned to work at home a second day that same week, so a couple of low-function work days and one under a quilt got me through. Cough still not gone, after two weeks (and even 10 days of optimistic Amoxicillin use), but I think it's a combination of exhaustion and allergies at this point. Perhaps the Thanksgiving holiday will give me a respite. My rib muscles ache from all the coughing.