Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles

By some miraculous combination of positive thinking, a drug cocktail of my own devising (Sudafed, Tylenol Cold, and Mucinex—doctors are for wimps), and a series of cute outfits (trust me on this one), I woke up this morning cured! Don't be fooled by the box of Kleenex I must carry everywhere I go or by my residual bronchial cough. Trust me, as of today I'm a whole new girl. Plus, I figure I can always pass off the hacking as some kind of acting exercise. After all, I am doing Bohème next.

I don't often long for a predictable 9 to 5 job, but this week it would have been nice to just take a couple sick days and stay in bed (or, you know, have the weekend off). Alas, it was not to be. I don't flatter myself to think that I'm totally indispensable, but I do have a hard time staying home from work. It took several meditation exercises to get over the guilt resulting from my one evening's missed rehearsal. Luckily, I didn't have to deal with being sick all alone. My friends all had different ways of helping me cope. The New Oregonian called me "sweet angel" and offered me French toast and tea, CameraMan called me "sickie" and emailed me funny YouTube videos to cheer me up, The Wise Soprano pet my hair during rehearsal breaks, and my sweet kitten was extra snuggly in bed when my cough and the inability to breathe through my nose kept me from sleeping. It was a pretty miserable 3 days, but I certainly didn't mind the pampering.

I'm healthy just in time to move to stage tomorrow night, our first Piano Tech for Flute. Somehow the first onstage rehearsal always seems to creep up on me, so I spent part of this evening making sure I was prepared.

The other part of the evening I spent celebrating my miraculous good health with friends, tamales, and one very small margarita. There has to be some reward for self-diagnosis and successful self-treatment, right?