I have an ill wife. She has The Flu. No, not just A Bad Cold, but The Actual Flu. Which sucks. Symptoms were showing on Thursday when her folks arrived, but she managed to fight it until they departed on Saturday. This appears to have used up her last reserves of strength, as she has been holed up in bed now for two days straight. I came home tonight to find her mewling with pain; she couldn't hold herself upright for long enough to fetch the tablets from our medicine cupboard. (To my shame, I even scolded her tonight for being so silly as not to have taken pain relieving tablets all day; way to be supportive, Chris.) This could last for a week or even two, according to NHS Direct.
We have no doctor in London yet (after three years), but I went to the pharmacist to ask for some medication to provide some respite. I now have a 24 hour remedy (colour-coded tablets for night and day) and anaesthetic and antibiotic throat lozenges. Plus plenty of fluids. She hasn't eaten a full meal since Saturday evening; the best she has managed is half a bowl of soup yesterday and, today, a few chunks of pineapple.
We, collectively, as a household, feel like shit at the minute. We've both been hurling ourselves at our work with gusto for so long, and now, at the end of the year, we just seem to be running on empty. There's just nothing left. A sort of long-term exhaustion has set in. Not the self-congratulatory exhaustion that comes at the end of a stint of hard work on one project, but the sapping malaise that comes from realising that once you've finished that project, there are three others to be done, one of which is already late. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. We need a holiday, but we have neither the money to hand over to someone to do it all for us, nor the energy to piece together a budget option. Plus, apparently I only have half a day's holiday left in this year's allocation.
The problem we both have is that we just don't know a different way to work. We both need to be throttling back a bit, I think, for our sanity and physical well-being, but neither of us likes the idea of a job done badly. There must be corners which can be cut or processes which can be streamlined, but for the life of me, I don't know where.
So, yeah, it's all a bit fucking depressing, really. Plus, there's the very real possibility that I'll get this bug from my better half myself.
I can't take this for much longer; something's gotta give.