#and it is exponentially worsened by starting my period today

[foldingfittedsheets]

So neither my wife or I have been sleeping well and their mother in law is visiting. She’s been hacking and coughing since she arrived setting off all my panic alarms about getting sick. We’ve gotten two negative covid tests but over the counter drugs aren’t able to tackle her cough.

It’s hard to tell what’s paranoia, allergies, poor sleep, or real illness but I’ve been feeling worse and worse over the last couple days. We have a feast planned at a medieval village on Saturday with several friends and an unventilated room full of people.

She’s staunchly resisting the idea of going to the doctor, insisting this is allergies even after admitting she’s never had allergies like this. The more medical questions we ask the more she digs her heels in. She finally admitted her nose fluids are not in fact clear.

My wife went to tell her we’re dragging her to a walk in clinic tomorrow to get a clear bill of health before the feast but I feel like she resents how alarmed I am by her illness. She’s not pleased with the plan.

[sickfic-with-kiko]

Hi! Could you please write a fic with a stomach bug Tsukki and a panicking Yama? Love your fics so much!

got any tsukki whump?            

Tsukishima wakes up feeling awful. It takes him a few seconds to figure out what type of awful it is, and he realises it’s sick person awful. His stomach feels queasy and crampy, and he debates whether to suck it up or stay at home. 

It takes ten more seconds for him to realise he has a biology test in fifth period. Risking his grade isn’t an option, seeing as science isn’t a strength of his. With a groan, he pushes himself up and places a hand on his stomach. 

“Morning, Tsukki!” 

Yamaguchi’s peppy voice greets him, and Tsukishima gives a nod of acknowledgement. “Good morning,” he murmurs, walking to school in the least painful way possible. 

“I heard Hinata failed his English test again…” Yamaguchi sighs. At the start of the school year, Yamaguchi would have laughed. But now that he’s formed a bond with Hinata, he’s genuinely concerned. Tsukishima knows how Yamaguchi works. 

“It shouldn’t be that hard if he had just studied,” Tsukishima replies, grimacing through the wave of pain. 

Yamaguchi shrugs. “But some people just find it hard to study, you know? Some people can’t get high grades even if they try.” He glances at Tsukishima’s hand, floating above his abdomen. “Uh, Tsukki, you okay?”

Tsukishima’s head snaps up. “What? I’m fine. Let’s go to class.” His shoulders heave with an irritated huff, and manages to get Yamaguchi to stop vocalizing his worry. 

The discomfort in his stomach only changes for the worse, throughout the day. When two classes are over, he’s fighting back burps that rise to his throat and cramps that wrack his entire abdomen. He’s getting sicker. 

He stops to think of a reason why it’s happening. He hadn’t eaten anything weird, or forgotten to wash his hands. A stomach bug seemed to fit the description. 

"You're not gonna eat?" 

Yamaguchi asks, nibbling his own food. Tsukishima shakes his head. He picks at the rice and pushes it around with his chopsticks, but doesn’t manage to really eat anything. His stomach has decided that every piece of food is revolting to him right now. 

It’s only a few more classes. Tsukishima decides he’ll skip practice for today. The team can manage without him, and the third years would send him home if they knew he was sick, anyway. 

All he has to endure now, is the biology test. 

Tsukishima stares at the key terms in his notebook, cramming the information into his head one last time. His stomach twists even worse when he attempts to focus on the tiny lettering. Reading makes him feel motion sick. 

“Okay, everyone. Put your books away.” Nakamura-sensei begins to hand out the sheets, and Tsukishima swallows hard. It’s only for twenty minutes. He can do this. He’s been dealing with the discomfort all day. 

As Tsukishima begins to fill the answers into the boxes provided, the roiling cramps evolve into something more sinister. His stomach gives a suspicious lurch, and the room feels awfully hot. 

By the time he’s halfway through the test, he’s struggling to hold down the sick-sounding noises from his throat. Despite the lack of food in his system, his stomach feels bloated and stiff. His fist curls and uncurls from the pain. 

An unproductive heave catches him off-guard, and he almost panics. The nausea worsens exponentially, breath catching in his throat. He’s going to throw up, sooner or later. 

Ten minutes left. Tsukishima rubs at his stomach with a frown, willing the queasiness to go away. A hiccup pushes out of his mouth, and something heavy shifts in his chest. 

His eyes start to water, and his mouth is heavy with spit. Just as he contemplates whether to put his hand up and run to the bathroom, the bell rings and ends the class. 

Before anyone can talk to him, Tsukishima bolts out of the classroom, hand clamped over his mouth. 

A rush of liquid rises up his throat, and Tsukishima holds down a gag as he walks hastily into one of the stalls. With a loud gag, he brings up what little breakfast and lunch he’d consumed. When he heaves for the second time, the dinner he’d eaten the day before splashes beneath him. 

Tears of exertion swell in his eyes. Guttural retches escape his throat, and the clench in his stomach hurts so bad he almost keels over. Tsukishima absolutely refuses to let his face or hands go anywhere near the toilet bowl, even as he’s expelling his stomach contents violently. 

The food isn’t even digested properly. Its consistency is chunky, and it sticks in his throat until he coughs it out. The sight gets to him before the smell does. He’s not awarded a full inhale, before he gags painfully, scraping his throat. 

“Oh shit- oh god, okay, okay. It’s okay. I knew it. You’re sick.” 

A hand is on Tsukishima’s back, rubbing gentle circles as he spits out a foul-coloured glob into the toilet bowl. A string of spit hangs from his mouth, dripping past his lips. 

Yamaguchi presses some tissues to Tsukishima’s mouth, wiping the refuse off his lips and chin. He removes his glasses carefully, dabbing at his swollen eyes. 

“Come on.” Yamaguchi holds him up, flushing the toilet. “Let’s go to the infirmary. Can you stand?”

Tsukishima nods, shaking. Yamaguchi takes off his own jacket and places it onto his shoulders. It has a comforting scent, from his childhood. 

Yamaguchi slides the infirmary door open, looking around for the nurse. “Excuse me? My friend’s not feeling well. Can he rest here?”

The nurse comes out from behind one of the curtains, making her way over to them. “What happened? You look really pale.” 

Tsukishima slumps down on one of the beds, clutching his aching stomach. “I threw up just now. My stomach hurts and I just feel exhausted.” 

“There’s a stomach bug making the rounds lately.” The nurse hands him a bottle of pocari sweat, kept at room temperature. “Since you’ve already vomited once, I need to call your parents. Both of you, stay there for a bit.”

Tsukishima’s day is going absolutely awful. He doesn’t even have the energy to sit up anymore. He slips off his shoes and lies down on the bed, breaths ragged and painful. 

“You do really look sick.” Yamaguchi opens the bottle of pocari sweat. “Drink something, Tsukki. You need to replace the water in your body.”

Tsukishima’s mouth tastes awful. He reluctantly takes the bottle and gulps down the sweet-tasting liquid, throat moving up and down with each swallow. He’s under the covers, and he’s still shivering. He can barely talk. 

“Today is a shit day,” Tsukishima murmurs, and Yamaguchi pats his head like he’s ten years younger than him. But it’s comforting, so he doesn’t complain. 

He closes his eyes, hoping to get some rest while he can. Once he gets home, he can be left alone to suffer on his own. His head sinks into the pillow, and his limbs relax under the blankets. 

All of a sudden, his eyes flutter open. 

“Is something wrong?” Yamaguchi asks, when Tsukishima lifts his head and shudders. “Are you feeling sick?”

Tsukishima doesn’t even have the energy to open his mouth. The nausea is rising right up to his throat, without any warning. A gag swells up his cheeks, and Yamaguchi notices the signs of imminent disaster. 

“Hey, it’s okay. I’m sure we can��” Yamaguchi grabs a plastic bag from nearby, shoving it under Tsukishima’s chin. It’s see-through, but also the only receptacle closely available. 

An awful-sounding retch rips out of Tsukishima’s throat, burning with a vengeance. With almost nothing left to be sick with, the heaves are more forceful, coming from deep inside his stomach. His stomach is sensitive and sore, with one movement setting off waves of coiled-up pain.

A small amount of green-tinted liquid pools at the bottom of the bag, weighing it down. The humiliation of being watched as he’s emptying his stomach burns in his cheeks. Yamaguchi surely thinks of him as a disgusting person now. 

Three or four more heaves later, Tsukishima’s stomach calms down enough for him to sip on the pocari sweat again. Yamaguchi is the one who holds it to his lips, without doing so much as frowning. 

“...Sorry. I know I’m gross right now.” Tsukishima murmurs, coughing into his palm. He feels better after throwing up, but he doesn’t know how long it’ll last before he’s bent over in pain again. 

Yamaguchi glares at him softly. “This isn’t anything, Tsukki. We’re friends, it happens sometimes. Don’t apologize.” He snickers. “Besides, you’ve had your worse moments.” 

“Have not.” Tsukishima is glad he isn’t the type go blush easily. 

“Trust me, you have.”

Tsukishima grunts weakly, sitting up as the nurse comes back. Relief floods him, when he realises he can go home. 

“Tsukishima-kun, you can go home now. Your parents are here.”

Yamaguchi holds his hand out to him, to help him stand up on his feet. “Get well soon! I’ll fill you in on studies, so don’t worry!” He gives him a quick hug, knowing he’s not in the position to refuse it. 

A smile almost pulls up on his face. Instead, he scrunches up his nose. “I hope I won’t have to put up with this shit any longer than a day.”

[fauxdive]

This is stating the obvious to a ridiculous degree, but my relationship with my body is really awful.

I look at it, and I look at people who are considered attractive by the wider world, and I don’t see any similarities beyond being a human body in not-awful shape. Again, I have a list as long as my uneven arms of what exactly is “wrong” with me, which goes into minute detail, and any time someone is kind enough to compliment me on something, I’m fighting the urge to unfurl this list and correct them. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware this would be a dreadfully antisocial and ungrateful thing to do, but I kinda hate to give people the wrong impression of me.

Since most of these compliments come via the internet and social media, very few people of these people have seen me in the pale and spotty flesh and I’d really hate to seem like a “catfish” or be a disappointment should they ever then meet me in “real life”.

I’d say I don’t even know where it started, but I’m fairly certain of a few roots. 

A girl told me she liked me on the way home back in Year 7, and as a naive little idiot who didn’t realise she was taking the piss, I obviously went and bragged about it to friends. The next day, she walks up to our table in the cafeteria, asks me if I’d told people, and informed me that she wasn’t being serious. 

General teasing at school about my appearance; my godawful hair (Alex Turner has a lot to answer for), my gap teeth (and subsequent braces), my spots, my big chin. Of course, if you’re not a bully, this stuff is par for the course really, but for an undiagnosed autistic lad, it left a mark.

A house party in the Summer of 2009; I’m sat with my girlfriend at the time, and we were more than a little drunk. She insults this dickhead who was the on-off boyfriend of a friend of mine (he was that kind of guy who still hung around kids at his high school years after leaving), calling him Harry Potter. He spins around, and says to her “have you SEEN your boyfriend?” and scoffed.

This is more of a general one, but that year or two where I was more that a little overweight. I look back on pictures from those days with a mixture of fear and hatred. I’m annoyed that I let myself and my brain fall into that pit. I wasted so much time, cowering away at home, cramming my face with small mountains junk and thinking I was fine. I’m also annoyed that I actually managed to grow my hair long during the period of my life that I looked my worst. In a lot of ways, I still feel like that 17st version of myself; every time my stomach rolls and folds over, every time I feel my chin wobble, every time I see my hip-to-waist ratio, I get a pang of some emotion I can’t pinpoint. I know for certain it’s not positive however.

Looking through the photos from the 5K I ran today was not a pleasant experience. I understand very few people look decent while running long-distance (other than that Ridiculously Photogenic Runner meme guy [vintage meme alert]), but my face looks like it’s melting in several of them. I look as though I’ve had a stroke in one in particular. Thank god for the photo-editing apps on my phone. I don’t remember when I started looking so tired. I’ve always had deep eye ares, dark circles, lines under my eyes - they’re confirmed family traits, unfortunately - but in the last few years, they all seem to have worsened exponentially. It’s baffling.

Long story short, in addition to the mountain of work I have to do on my personality, there’s probably an equal amount that needs attending to on my self-image. I do fear that if I don’t magically wake up looking like Tom Hardy/Ezra MIller/John Boyega/Idris Elba/any other attractive-and-famous man, I’ll have failed in that. I don’t see how anyone could look at the countless beautiful people on the planet and think I should be included in that group, let alone want to be in any kind of relationship with me for any length of time,

Like I said, it’s a mountain of work.