On The Verge

I woke up this morning with relief; I'm feeling almost normal now and those sickly sensations that wore me down yesterday are gone. I said 'almost normal' because there is still a tinge of heatiness to the touch on my body even though the aches & lethargy are gone. Yeap, and I know that starting a blog entry with 'I woke up this morning' is like writing the opening lines of a Blues song.

Yesterday while I was at work, I think I experienced vertigo for the first time in my life (that world-spinning sensation you sometimes experience when intoxicated doesn't count). I was at the train station making my way to my customer's place when all of a sudden, the world around me started spinning and I had to steady myself like a sailor on deck caught in a tumultuous storm.

It only lasted for like 3 seconds. But those 3 seconds were enough to make me wonder if that was an introductory phase to something that might last longer and hit me harder, like the little drizzle before the main storm hits during a typhoon season. It got me kinda surprised as I thought to myself: "What?! Vertigo?! While sober?! Me?!".

Perhaps it's the weather lately. It's summer now and because home ground is just 1 degree above the equator, summer here can be one mean sonofabitch. June used to be the hottest month but the seasons got pushed forward. It's called 'Global Fucking Warming'.

It has been so terribly hot and humid lately with an unrelentless, scorching merciless sun beating down on everything that maybe, I thought to myself, my brains were fried silly or the grey matter in my head was approaching boiling point. Perhaps that was what rocked my world at the train station.

No, it wasn't fun. That was actually quite worrying.

And it was just a shitty day with shitty people with shitty navigation skills; I've lost count of the number of times when people almost walked straight into me at Bugis Junction. That place is crowded and having to force oneself to be more alert than usual when one's body is wearing down and having to constantly side-step here & there to avoid human crashes can induce a headache or worsen an existing one.

Some people have their eyes open while walking but their minds and awareness are completely switched off. Why is it that I was tired and kinda feeling sickly but they didn't seem so and I was the one who had to do the side-steppings for them?

Perhaps I should one day don on a Heavy Metal jacket covered with protruding spikes and let these insensitive wankers walk right into me. Not that I have such a jacket but whatever.

The only thing that cheered me up while I was at Bugis Junction was that after I was done serving my customers there, I spotted a pair of work pants at Domanchi which I liked and bought.

By the time I got home, I was feeling a strange sensation that sorta reminded me of the symptoms of Malaria; my joints seemed to ache, I was quite lethargic all over and my body felt hot to the touch while I was feeling as if chilly weather had set in. It was then that I was pretty sure I was now on the verge of becoming ill.


Every morning before I leave my house for work, I'll pop a Shaklee vitamin C tablet with sustained release. The antioxidant helps my body withstand harmful environmental effects and boosts up my immune system.

For anyone not in the know, taking supplements with sustained release is better when it comes to preparing your body for the day since they release the beneficial properties over a span of several hours as opposed to just immediate effect on the spot.

So supplements with sustained release will keep on benefiting your body throughout the day. The releases have a finite duration of course. In the case of my vitamin C, I think it's around 4 hours.

And no, taking 2 tablets together at the same time won't give you 8 hours of continuous benefit. If you want that, take a second tablet after 4 hours from popping the first one, which also means that taking more than one sustained release tablet in one go is unnecessary wastage.

They come more costlier than the cheaper non-sustained release ones but as you can already tell, they last longer with better efficiency. Fair deal to me.

I need my vitamin C because I have to travel about the country for my work and we have shit for weather here in the tropical belt that wears you down. If I hadn't taken my vitamin C yesterday, I think my body would have succumbed to the toll on it and I would have gone over the edge and fallen into full-bloom sick territory.

In this case, I don't view my cup as being half-empty despite my natural-born cynicism. If I had, I would have mentioned here that my vitamin tablets didn't do squat. Oh, and 10 hours of sleep done on purpose also did the trick.

Good thing I'm almost fully recovered or I would be tortured at the compulsory sales training for the sales division this Friday, which is supposed to last past the entire work day all the way till 19:30pm, way past the official hour when our work is supposed to end at 17:30pm. Think I'll drag my colleagues with me after that for some golden liquid remedy and induce our own vertigo.

So minimize your exposure to the sun, drink lots of water, strengthen your immune system and take good care of yourself.