I caught a cold, not a bad one. It started with a sore throat, then the fatigue, doubling and tripling within moments until I was completely drowning in it.

So I spent almost a whole day lying in bed and it just got worse and worse. After the surgery, my left chest is sort of half-petrified, I need some exercises to pump into the blood into it so it is not that stiff. When I stopped exercising, it feels like my circulation has also stagnate, therefore the sores settle in and try to take control of my body.

I know it’s not just physically, but both mentally. I watched that my husband once slept himself into a cripple, both mentally and physically, and how it took to get him on his feet again. After that, I got a bed-rest phobia. I start to believe, as long as I could stand up and live like a normal person, I was invincible and I was above the cancel. It’s an elegant deception, a mental pirouette.

Therefore, I pulled myself out of the bed with the intensity of an insane. The ear-ringing was so loud that I almost stumbled over. However, I managed to stand up and I could hear my heart beating wildly under the thin film of skin and it almost drown out my ear-ringing.

I don’t know if it is another spirit-over-matter case, and I am just swept up in this superstition, but I did feel after I forced myself into my daily routine: learning, reading, cleaning and helping my son with his study. It’s like a battle, I literary took back the control of my body, piece by piece.