Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Pneuma

The word pneuma means one’s vital soul, one’s spark — a creative spirit.

The word pneumonia probably then means some kind of goblin that attaches to your lung meat and drains you of your creative spirit and spark. I’m pretty sure it’s Latin. Shut up.

Anyway, so, this last weekend I went to the Tucson Festival of Books — which is really such a stellar festival, expertly run with a volunteer army that operates flawlessly — and on the last day, when traveling home, I started to feel…

Well, not so hot.

Feverish, achy, all that good stuff.

Got home and had a pretty rocking fever, and the next day I went to the doc. Flu has spiked hard in our area, and apparently all over, and so I worried that’s what it was. He said usually flu knocks you flat, makes you feel like you’re hit by a truck. His fear, instead, was that my pneumonia from December had returned. Once you get pneumonia, you can be pretty susceptible to it going forward. And that’s the diagnosis — that I have pre-pneumonia, or walking pneumonia. Which means it is developing, I guess? I still get that crispy campfire lung-crackle when I breathe, which is exactly what I felt last time I had this totally charming illness. Ugh.

Anyway, last time I was out of commission in whole or in part for a month — from Thanksgiving to Christmas. This time, I’m hoping because we got ahead of it and I started antibiotics early that maybe I can cut this thing off at the knees.

Just the same, it means blogging will be light for the next week or so.

And it puts my travel next week to Denver for AnomalyCon in question. The doc doesn’t feel that traveling right now is necessarily the hottest idea, and that it could foster the illness to take stronger hold. Huge apologies to anyone who was hoping to see me next week, but I don’t think it’ll be in the cards. And apologies too to AnomalyCon, which by all reports is a stellar convention.

So, if you’re looking for something from me in the next week or so — ennnnh, I’d maybe expect a delay in that. I will try to ramp up back to work fast as I can muster.