On top of all the other talents I possess, I think I’ve developed a new one. It seems my body has learned to heal itself, after a night of profuse sweating.
The first time this happened was after Thanksgiving, with the nasty cold I had. I suffered with it a couple of days, then one night, while still feeling miserable, I became soaking wet with sweat. All night, I tossed and turned, sick and clammy. When I woke up, the sheets were damp and so were my sweats. But amazingly, I felt so much better. My cold had virtually disappeared overnight!
It happened again last night. I had an excruciating stomach ache that started up around 9:00 pm. By the time we were all ready for bed around 2am, I was lying on the lounge chair under a blanket, feverish and then shivering with chills. Nobody else is sick around here. I haven’t really been out and about to catch anything from someone else. Big Daddy said it sounded like I had some kind of food poisoning.
I couldn’t imagine how I would have gotten food poisoning. We’ve been cleaning up the leftovers, and I also had made some fresh homemade chicken soup. The leftovers are not that old — from New Year’s and after, and all properly stored. Plus, no one else that ate the same things seemed to be sick. But this morning Oldest Son asked me if I had eaten any of the KFC chicken he had brought home yesterday. I told him that I had, and then he said that when he ate his, he noticed some of it was pinker than it should be. I hadn’t noticed, another hazard of gobbling one’s food down so fast. But why hadn’t he gotten sick? He said I might have gotten the one piece that was contaminated with something, or his immunity was so built up from his year in Iraq. He enjoyed the food over there, but it didn’t always like him.
So anyways, I went to bed with extra blankets, my teeth chattering with the chills. Throughout the night, I would wake up and notice that I was drenched with sweat. I was soaking wet. But by the time the morning light was streaming in, I felt like new. No fever. No chills. And no more stomach ache. Just clammy wet pajamas and sheets.
They say your mind can work through unresolved issues through your dreams at night. I’ve had that happen. One night, after struggling with the best way to handle a tax situation for a client, I dreamt about the solution. It was the perfect solution that I wasn’t able to come up with during the day. But until recently, I’ve never known my body could heal itself overnight.
Maybe I shouldn’t have so much of a problem making myself go to bed at night. It seems that sleep may be my friend.
