I'm Sick

It's currently nine am, and I'm sick. Trust me, it's not a new experience, and I'm not putting myself up on a pedestal, I'm sure you've all been so sick that you've been burning up, had splitting headaches, watery eyes, runny noses, unrelenting coughs and asthma attacks all at once, but I just have to rant about how much it's driving me nuts.

I didn't sleep at all last night, besides the gnawing pain in my chest and throat, every time I was on the brink of falling asleep, I relaxed, and suddenly couldn't breathe and had a coughing fit.

I've spent the last entire week in bed, I haven't left the house in four days, not since I went to the doctor to get medication...

Which, by the way, has done absolutely nothing. Seriously, since I started taking a handful of drugs every day, I've only gotten worse and worse. They may as well be placebos, but now that I think about it, placebos would probably be more effective! It might look like I'm trying to get a vote of sympathy, but honestly I'm just venting.

I feel like it's four in the morning, I'm totally drunk, and my girlfriend just dumped me. So logically, because I'm clearly thinking straight, the first thing I would do is jump on Facebook and tell the whole world how much my life sucks.

No doubt this will be full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

But I could care less. If anything, messing up spelling deliberately will add to the authenticity, but thank goodness for spell-check, even if it always thinks your last name is a mistake.

It doesn't matter anyway though, because no one is on Facebook at four in the morning so it's all for nothing, but the drunk girlfriend-less guy thinks he's Shakespeare, so he goes and posts about thirty times. Of course I can go one better than that because I have a blog, so I can tell thousands of people how much my life sucks right now.

But let's be honest, at least half of my "hits" are just people Google searching for images and coming across the images on my blog, most of which I got from other people's blogs and various other sites.

Pretty sure I've only got two consistent readers anyway: Lenner Fisher, cheers mate, and my mum: who by the way will probably be annoyed that I spent twenty minutes ranting about how sick I am on my blog.

Did I mention that I'm leading on two children's camps these holidays? Yeah. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be babysitting a bunch of primary school-aged children. That's not exactly something I can just cancel, or choose not to go to.

I've got a whole week of one camp, and a one day layover, on which is my eighteenth birthday party. I come home from camp, totally ruined, and probably still sick, and I have a raging party that night. Brilliant. Course, my birthday was nearly a month earlier than that, but this was the only available date we could manage.

Here's the kicker though, the day after the party, is another camp. Same demographic, same length of time, same purpose in ministry. One vital difference though:

Camp number one is a camp meant for Christian kids who have probably grown up in Christian families whose parents are well-off enough to send their kids away to a camp for the holidays.

Camp number two has a one-to-one kid to leader ratio, and all the kids there were recommended by a social worker or chaplain because they've experienced abuse or neglect, and this could be the only chance the whole year where they can really have a good time and feel loved and appreciated.

So that one will be physically demanding, but also emotionally intense.

Don't get me wrong, I'm so glad to have the opportunity to help these kids and just be their friend, and I'm sure there will be plenty of highlights. But man, I'm so messed up already from this bloody cold.

I have absolutely no doubt that this sickness came just days before the most intense two weeks of my life, and possibly the most important two weeks of some of these kid's lives.

Because trust me, I know exactly how life-changing camps can be, of any shape and size. So I literally just slapped myself in the face. I gave myself a searing headache, but I stopped myself from crawling up into the fetal position and crying until I got better.

So I'm just gonna use the power of positive reinforcement to pretend I'm not sick. Because let's face it, the drugs are doing bugger all.

So, be praying for me, for sickness, and for not being overrun with small children and dying during some cruel game of stacks on or something, as well as for the poor kid I will be looking after on camp number two.

So even though lying in bed all night and not being able to sleep at all has been the story of the whole week, I'm so exhausted after using all the possible reserves of energy left in my body to write what may be one of the longest diary entries yet, and possibly the longest sentence I've ever written, that I'm either going to crash like a rock when I try take two of getting some sleep today, or I'm simply going to collapse on desk.

Apologies for the ranting, and for the meaningless tangents and nonsense that isn't really related to anything. Thanks for the prayers, thank you to my two favourite readers, Lenny and mum, as well as to the Google image searchers who are not going to read this but are only in it for the pics.

And be on the lookout for a follow up post where I'll go more into detail on the two camps.

PS. If you are a consistent reader; (Good on you for making it this far down the page without quitting) comment, or something. It's a long shot I know, but I feel like I barely know you, and twenty-two thousand hits can't all be Google image searchers, right? RIGHT?