Do people treat cold sores now with prescription medication or just ride them out with home remedies? I’m just asking for a friend. This is one lingering effect of Covid, which I’m mostly over, along with a pesky cough and a totally deranged sleep schedule. I was already going to bed at 8 or 8:30 and getting up at 4:30 or 5 most of the time, but now I’m going to bed around 7 pm and waking up around 3. Last night Max kissed me goodnight (I could still hear the neighbor kids playing outside on the lawn) and said “Try to stay in bed until daylight.” I guess this is getting a little ridiculous.
If Sarah were here I would creep around the first floor of our house and take extra care not to wake her up in her bedroom, which is near my study, where I hang out in the early morning hours, and the living room, where Polly the Beagle and I occasionally crash on the couch for what we call a “Napperoni and Cheese.” Not to be confused with a Nappy Nap, or a Napsicle, or a Naptitude, to doze away the early morning rebound sleepiness.
I know that Sarah is not really in her room anymore but it’s nice to imagine her there in her Stampy pajamas in her Sleep Safe bed with her feeding pump carefully administering her overnight formula and the giant air filter in her room (“the Whooshmaster”) humming soothingly. If she were to call out this early, I would try to go in and re-settle her, reposition her limbs and turn her pillow over or move the blanket off or on her. “It’s still nighttime Sweetie” I would say. She could often be induced to sleep more that way, until she had to wake up to get ready for school around 6 am.
But sometimes she held firm and she wanted to get up with me. Then I would change her and move her into the living room with several of her favorite stuffies (Shoe Banana, her stuffed monkey that she’d had since she was 2; Otto the Minion, her current favorite; Fluffy, her stuffed unicorn and Cousin Fluffy, her other stuffed unicorn, and whoever else she wanted that day). We would both set up in there and she would watch YouTube usually and I would have my laptop out doing work or surfing the net until it was time to wake up Daddy.
When I go into her room now her stuffies seem so lonely and bereft. They had so much fun for so many years. I want to apologize to them for ignoring them and not keeping up with their lives and plot lines. (Shoe Banana even had his own show on YouTube). But they will not be forgotten.
The First Year Without Sarah 