Hey! The title rhymes! Anyway...Week 2 of NaNo is upon us (and I have failed again...my updating of this blog leaves something to be desired...) and my word count should be about 17,000...however it is only a mere 8,316...
Compared to how I was doing by this point last year I feel pathetic! My characters have been stuck in chapter 3 getting almost kidnapped and trapped in an alternate dimension for about four days now! (Um...four days in our world...in their world it's only been a couple hours.)
But the kidnapping isn't the problem, the bad-guys didn't get away with it and are currently doing what minor-villains do: running away. The alternate dimension isn't the problem either, two of my characters practically take afternoon strolls through the place on a regular basis (character #3, my current point-of-view character, however, is mildly freaking out because he doesn't know what in the world is happening...Oh yeah. He's the one who was being kidnapped).
No. Those things aren't the problem.
Do want to know? Do you REALLY want to know what happened to get me so far behind? I'll tell you.
It was......THE STOMACH FLU!!! *cue dramatic thunderclap, lightning bolt, and music-of-doom*
Yes. The stomach flu. Here's what happened.
It was last Saturday and we hadn't been home all day so I had missed all writing time (I had missed all of Friday too for the same reason) and I was planning to do at least a little catching up when we got home after church that evening.
During church my stomach started to feel a little...blech-ish, but it wasn't any worse than some normal indigestion so I dismissed it. After church and on the drive home I felt better so I didn't think about it. We got home and I did a little writing but other people wanted some computer time (we have two computers, my mom's laptop and my dad's laptop, and there are five currently in our house).
So while I had some brief writer's block (grrrrr!) I left the computer to whichever of my family members would claim it (probably my brother want to play World of Warcraft or my sister wanting to email a friend) and went to talk the writer's block out of me by giving a not-entirely-brief summary of what I had written so far to my dad. My dad's a great listener and when I'm stuck he's a huge help, pointing out things I'm not noticing, giving me facts, all that good stuff, so I talked while he finished making dinner and then we all sat down together in our library (it's not like an enormous library, and it has our TV in the room so it's kinda like a rec room where we do family movies and stuff) and we watched True Grit while we ate dinner.
I was still feeling fine (we ate bowtie pasta with marinara sauce and meatballs, by the way. It was good) until the movie ended and we were getting ready for bed and I suddenly started to feel nauseous. I took something for my stomach but by the time I laid down to sleep it was worse. Way way worse. I thought it was probably something I ate. I tried not to think about it but I eventually had to flee to the bathroom. You know how normally after you've thrown up you feel a little better? (except for the whole...throwing up thing...) Well I did feel better so I figured it had been something I ate (my parents said so too) so I drank some water and went back to bed feeling a lot better. However, not more than fifteen minutes passed before I was up again. I figured that now I would be better and could get some sleep so after some more water I went back to bed.
This cycle repeated about two more times before my parents gave me some anti-nausea medicine. That didn't work though, and after the fifth time my parents decided to take me to the emregency room because I couldn't even keep any water down.
I should mention that by this point my dad had started feeling the same way I was (no puking though, so bonus for him) so he drove me.
I have this sort-of-bad habit where I apologize for everything so while I was shivering in the passenger seat, wrapped in a blanket, holding a large, bucket/container on my lap, and starting to run a fever I say "I'm sorry."
My dad looks at me and he asks me why and I say "Because you have to take me to the hospital." (...yeah...it sounds even more stupid when I type it...)
So my dad kind of laughed and said, "Hey, I'm feeling the same way. If I start vomiting all over the place and passing out then the emergency room is the best place I can be."
My response, "Oh."
It was about midnight when we left so we got there about 12:20-something.
After getting called out of the waiting room we went with the nurse and she weighed me and then we we to a room and she asked me some questions.
One of the questions she asked was "On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst, how bad is your pain?" which seemed like an odd question because I wasn't really in pain...I was really sick.
If she had asked how I felt I would have said...hmm...probably like an 11 or a 12. But I just answered "Uh...I guess...4 or 5?"
Then I got put into another room where they hooked me up to and IV and over the next nine hours or so they gave me like four or five bags of fluids for my dehydration and a couple anti-nausea injections. I guess it was good that we went to the E.R. because I kept throwing up until about 8 or 9-something in the morning when they gave me a different anti-nausea medicine that worked and they let me go home (and by that time I had developed a delightful headache to go with everything else that had begun to be sore: neck, back, shoulder, etc...).
We got home around 10am and I went straight to bed and slept off and on for most of the day. I woke up sometime in the afternoon and couldn't fall asleep so I watched the first few episodes of the first season of Pokemon on my dad's laptop before dozing off again (I was barely coherent for episode 2 or 3 and when I woke up the laptop was gone...sad...).
So there was no more vomiting (yaaaay!) and by Tuesday I was feeling pretty much recovered. However, since I was feeling better right in the middle of the school week I had to take care of all of that school work before I could write, and with minimal energy due to the flu it left me too tired by the end of the day to do any writing. I was feeling fine on Wednesday but we were out so no writing that evening either.
And that brings us to today, Thursday (*looks at the clock*) okay...so now it's midnight which makes it Friday but you catch my drift. Thursday brought me writer's block...and I used my writing time tonight to update my blog (which I know I am failing at...) with this post which, by this sentence, is 1,247 words.
Well, it is way past my bedtime and I plan to get up early to write. I'm determined to catch up! So I shall be signing off for now! I will try to update sooner!
God bless you! (and keep you from the flu!)
And for my fellow writers: Happy writing!
