Can I hear you now?

So Hawaii was great fun, which I will detail later, but for now I will bitch and moan about my illness.

So I got sick the day before we left, just the basic cold. It kinda sucked while we were there because I was always so damn tired and just wanted to sit on the beach all day (which is why most people go to Maui in the first place, but whatevs, not me).

Our first full day on the island we went on a whalewatching boat ride, which would have been awful fun if I hadn't got awful seasick. I nearly made it to shore without throwing up, but being Laura, I puked when we were docking. Yay me!

Then we decided to go on a helicopter ride and while we didn't go terribly high, I knew something was terribly wrong with my ears. They wouldn't pop. And from then on, I couldn't hear very well.

The day before we left we went biking down a volcano, which would have been crazy fun if my eardrums hadn't gone crazy on me. Weird popping, twisting, snotting noises coming from them (in my head, at least). Pain. (Oh, this volcano was about 10,000 feet high, which accounts for why my ears didn't take a liking to it.)

So we left the next day and my ears did pretty well on the ascent. But, being parts of Laura, they decided to fuck up going into Dallas at 5 am. It was one of the most painful memories I can conjure up at the moment. I felt like my ears were going to implode and leave a gaping hole in my skull, which sounds kinda cool thinking about it after the fact, but at the moment it was torture. Damn planes and their quick descents. And the flight to Corpus wasn't all shits and giggles either...more pain, accompanied with the strangest noises coming from my eardrum.

My dad looked at my ears that morning and said that the capillaries in my eardrums had burst, which often happens to divers, or some shit like that. What had happened was that I had trapped fluid in my ear when I was sick, which isn't good for helping ears change their pressure. So the stress or something from that caused my capillaries to burst, which isn't a very comfy feeling. But I was reassured that they would get better, yadayadayada.

But then they kept getting worse. I could hear less and less the longer I waited to get better, plus I had the same kind of sore throat I had when I first got sick. One night I couldn't sleep. At all. The pain was horrendous from my left ear, so I couldn't sleep and instead watched TV all frickin night. When I talked to my mom in the morning, she goes, "Oh, you've been taking your doxycycline [an antibiotic I sometimes take for acne issues], right?" To which I replied, "I told you two days ago that I stopped taking it a while ago."

And then she says, "Ohhh...well, your ears are probably getting infected."

Yay. Fucking. Me.

I've barely left the house since I got home because I feel so damn awful. I had the worst case of fever aches last night, the worst I've had since I was about five. I can't hear much of anything, so I have to watch TV at ridiculously loud levels, and I can't really listen to music because nothing I have in Corpus can get my music to the level that I need to hear it. I'm too tired to read, plus my eyes have fever hurt in them, so my existence is miserable at the moment.

Feel bad for me.

[A more positive post should come soon. I have loads to say about Maui and my theories on childhood illness and all that good stuff, but I'm having trouble concentrating at the moment. The sickness has gone to my head...literally. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if the infection leaks into my brain and eats away whatever is still left.]