Giving up caffeine is a horrible experience. I’ve been trying since I came to China to quit drinking cola and coffee and have failed miserably in every attempt over the past three years. Today is the end of day two of my final attempt.

This time feels different. Unlike previous attempts, I didn’t want Coke immediately after the headache started. I planned my withdrawals to have the smallest impact on my classes as possible so I can weather the heavy parts over the weekend. I have no classes on Thursdays so the first day of no caffeine was Wednesday. I have classes in the morning but I’d had a coke the night before, so the suffering didn’t start until yesterday afternoon. Today I was in too much pain to do much of anything but I still managed to get up and go out to lunch. Tomorrow morning I have two classes and then the weekend starts. I plan to take extra naps and have also stocked up on icewater (I have 5 half-full bottles in the freezer).

If I fail again that means I’ll go back to Canada still addicted to caffeine, which is definitely something I wanted to leave behind in China. I can’t fail again, it’s too important.

A little more than two weeks ago I started to feel a tickle in my throat and noticed my nose was running. This lasted for three days before developing into what I assumed was just a common cold. Later began fatigue, coughing, loss of apetite, and other symptoms associated with a cold. Each day the cough got progressively worse, but I assumed that was because of the cold weather and tried to stay in as much as I could.

After four or five days the symptoms of my cold started to go away – except the cough. The cough stayed and got worse as the week continued. Then Yivan got sick and for two days she was as bad or worse than I had been. At the end of her two day sickness I got sick again and became quite unhappy about that as I had only just recovered. Another round of cold-like symptoms for another four or five days. Four days ago my cough was still getting worse.

The following day was when I realized I needed to go and see a doctor, I woke up at 5AM coughing up blood. I didn’t feel any pain so it seemed unusual to me to cough blood. I told Yivan I needed to go to the doctor, but that day wasn’t good because her family was going out of town and there was nobody to watch the baby. We decided to wait one day before going to the doctor – this was also a Sunday, so the hospitals would be very busy (no clinics here). The following day her family was supposed to go out again, but at 4am I woke up coughing for 15 minutes straight, this time big gobs of blood – enough to frighten me. I generally take a pretty positive approach to things, even bad things, but this was starting to be hard to make positive. I knew I wasn’t dying, but now I was worried that I’d do some sort of irreversable damage if I didn’t seek treatment immediately. Yivan messaged her father at 4am to tell him I needed the hospital badly.

This is a great example of why Yivan’s family is so amazing. When her father woke up around 8am he immediately called one of his friends who is a doctor at a local hospital. They came out to pick me up and take me to the hospital where I was able to skip the lines and get an x-ray and see an ear/throat/nose specialist immediately. The X-Ray showed there was nothing in my lungs, so whatever was wrong had to be in my throat. The specialist told me I have Pharyngitis, which, after researching online seems to be a word they use to describe a lot of different symptoms and a lot of different illnesses. I can’t narrow it down to one specific thing that is Pharyngitis and isn’t something else. It could be Strep Throat, it could be a cold, it could possibly even be the flu. I used Wikipedia so that might explain part of my confusion about the name of this particular illness. I was told it was caused by an upper respiratory tract infection, and quite a serious one. The doctors actually seemed a little surprised and worried but they were good about hiding it from everyone else. Today when I went back for my second treatment the doctor seemed very relieved when I told him the blood had been reduced.

The treatment was 125 yuan of medicine, some of which is delivered via a fancy inhaler at the hospital that I must repeat treatments with for three days. After the first day the blood had already been reduced significantly and my coughing is way down – now only cough when I stand in cold air too long.

In my life I cannot think of a time when I was more sick than this. I never got pneumonia, I did get measles and chicken pox as a child but I don’t remember suffering like I did these last two weeks. Now perhaps that is simply my brain repressing the pain like it often does but I can’t remember anything like this. The good news is it’s almost over and I’m not going to die.

Yivan has told me I don’t eat enough vegetables or fruit and that’s why I get sick so easily. I have decided she might be onto something after this last batch of illness. Today I made a spinach and chicken pizza with tons of spinach (dark green leafy vegetables are supposed to be awesome for health) and it was really really good. The trick, I suppose, is in finding a good place to put those vegetables so they don’t ruin the taste with all their greenmess.