Can't Breathe Now That I Can Breathe

I am sick.

I have been sick since the Saturday before. Actually it may have started on Friday but in any case, that's more than a week now. BOTH my ears are now blocked and yesterday I developed a cough for some reason. I was still coughing this morning, although it seems to have disappeared right now.

I blame the weather most of all. If it wasn't cold and damp all the time now, I probably would have recovered by now, without any of this irritating deafness.

But what brought it on was a combination of stress and inactivity. Yes, I haven't actually done very much exercise for about a month. I have grown fat and soft once again. The stress part was the start of the Design Week that all Level 3 engineering students have to go through. That started 2 weeks ago on the 19th. The point of the exercise was that we were all assigned a topic relating to engineering design and a group to work with. For an entire week, we would have no scheduled classes, but instead would meet up in various labs in FN to work on the design of whatever it is we got. What made it worse for my group is that at first we were told our report was due in on the Friday that week, with a presentation by the MEng students (me included (T.T)). 1 week to design and write a report on the preliminary design of a hydropower scheme is pretty fierce, let me tell you that. So as we all stressed and stayed in the engineering building til late at night to produce individual reports, we suddenly got word from our supervisor that she was extending the deadline to the following Friday.

On Thursday evening.

And there was no e-mail. No, no. She only told people she happened to bump into, and asked us to pass the word around.

$*#&^&*#*^$!!! Don't get me wrong. It WAS a good thing that she extended the deadline. BUT, the last minute notification and the mode of communication was just... lame, for a lack of better words. Plus, we learnt that the later Friday was supposed to have been the deadline in the first place, just that she got it wrong. Of all the #*$&#*%*.

Sigh.

The result was a horrendous onset of the flu. Of course, it didn't help that we had yet ANOTHER piece of work due in the same Friday. 1 formal report and 2 written logbooks. All due in the same day, at the same time. For 2 whole weeks, I was sleeping at 3am and waking up at 9am to be in for 10am. On the last Thursday I slept at 4.30am tidying up my work before submission.

But, at least everything's done now. I only have one last report due in 2 weeks. So I can breathe easier now. Except that I can't actually breathe without a tonne of drugs and nasal decongestants... (-_-''')