It's been a difficult few days: holding the presentation in Spanish in front of the entire class made me nervous and I ended up having fewer than 6 hours of sleep. Then my voice grew hoarse because I practiced too much for my choir's Christmas concert.
For the following two days I barely practiced singing at all, to rest my vocal cords. Unfortunately on the second day I had a flare-up of what I think were anemia symptoms, felt too limp to do much, and skipped both of my university classes. I was quite worried: not only did I need to have enough oxygen to sing for around 45 minutes (not including the warm-up), but I was also standing on a wooden platform during the concert and it would have been very risky if I'd become dizzy and had fallen off.
But by dint of sleeping and resting as much as possible, I felt well enough to jog around on the day of the choir concert itself. I braced my feet apart a little as I sang. Surprisingly I also don't think I made any egregious errors except when everyone else did too, having sung along with the men's voices by accident only during the warm-up.
Waking up before 7:30 a.m. on Monday was also not great. I felt so tired and weak that I held onto the stair railings on the way to the U-Bahn station, took much longer than usual to walk from the U-Bahn station to the university buildings, arrived half an hour late which I figured was better than passing out, and was pretty cranky because I just wanted to get home again. In the afternoon I'd perked up, so going back to university for the second class was less tormenting.
Obviously it would be best to visit the doctor again. The thing is that I don't want to take the darned iron pills again. Besides which I was satisfied with the conclusions of my tests in August: unexplained anemia means that you are trying to rule out a smorgasbord of different cancer types, and I was quite happy that a lot of types were indeed ruled out. Why reopen the topic? I'm also annoyed because I thought my diet had been not great, but nutritious enough, lately. Besides it's boring to keep having the same ailment, and droning on about it on this blog.
Tuesday evening I was getting ready to go to choir practice. Earlier in the evening I'd been thinking that I wasn't sure I was going to make it, but then I'd thought that I can't sideline my whole life because of anaemia. Whatever modifications I need to do to keep participating, like slowly walking somewhere instead of quickly cycling, I do. After that resolution, I got a second wind. But finally I realized at the last moment that I was not feeling fit enough after all.
This morning, having had over 6.5 hours of sleep, I felt rather better and felt extremely cheerful, although I was embarrassingly sleepy in my second class and had tingly headaches as I went home.
The professor of my morning class had mentioned a demonstration, which I was wildly curious about. When I looked it up on the police registry, it turned out to be a pro-Palestine students' protest, at the Humboldt University campus in the area around Unter den Linden. I'm a little mad that I wasn't feeling fit enough to go observe it, because my inner amateur journalist immediately popped up and reported for duty. (The role of student makes it difficult to report on my own university, due to conflicts of interest and the risk of retribution. Besides I figure it's better to be a good student and no reporter, than a lousy student who's also a lousy reporter. But this would have been safe, neutral territory; and I feel that chasing after one story per week is not going to distract me to a harmful degree from academic work.)
On the way home, I did stop to shop for dark chocolate with ginger in it (one of the perks, of course, of an iron-rich diet), and pecorino romano to go with the penne pasta and tomato sauce for dinner.
And at home, being in good spirits, I sat at the piano and played a few Christmas songs.
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