They Can't All Be Gems

I should have known. What idiot writes something like "I think it'g going to be a good tour."  That's just an invitation to disaster. And Thursday, when we played Breckenridge, disaster struck.

At least for me.

I overdid it at breakfast. Coffee, orange juice, a vitamin-- an acid overload if you will-- combined with windy roads made me feel oh so pukey. So I lay down a bit, avoided food. Drank ginger ale ever so sparingly. Avoided water. But I wasn't feeling better. I was getting worse.

By the time we reached the heights of Breckenridge, 9500 feet up in the air, I felt like hammered dogshit. And at that point I could have, should have, bowed out of my parental duties and napped. But the kids had been in the car most if the day and we had some time before the gig and I felt like I could rally and help Dave take them on an adventure.

I was wrong.

Why do we parents do that? I knew that the thing to do was rest and take care of myself. But I convinced myself that my family deserved the taking care of instead. Maybe it's because since I've become a mother, I have rarely, if ever, been sick and had the luxury of resting. Kids are still dependent on you, even when you haven't the wherewithal to wipe your own nose. But you find a way. You soldier on. Even when you shouldn't.

Thursday was a shouldn't day for me.

By the time we left for the gig, I could hardly walk. I slept for an hour in the back of the baby bus, which made me feel just well enough to totter to the big bus and get dressed.

Ray took one look at me and said "You're altitude sick"

"No I'm not. I just made myself kinda pukey at breakfast."

"You need to drink water."

"But it might make me throw up."

"Or it might make you feel better."

So I grabbed some water and started sipping.

It was not an instant fix, and right before I went on some glorious woman whose name I may never know took pity on me and recommended that I drink Gatorade if I had a stomach ick happening. Thank you unnamed woman. Because I grabbed some strange looking purple Gatorade that tasted surprising deliciously like melted down grape bubble gum, and brought that along with my water to the stage.

When I started the show, I felt worse than I can ever remember felling onstage. Awful. Yet I realized that no one wants to see someone grimace her way through an hour and a half of music. So I tried to find my smiley, if not exactly happy, place.

And thanks to small amounts of water and gatorade a I began to feel better and better, at least in the stomach department, as the show went on.

However, in the lung department, I was having some issues. The biggest of which was I felt like I couldn't breath.

I was gasping for air between phrases, gulping as much as I could in at a time. I still spent large part of the set convinced that I was seconds away from fainting. Actually, I had to sit out a song towards the end and skip the encore, because I was not convinced I had it in me to stay upright.

I guess the air really is thinner, way up high.

And I guess I really was altitude sick.

Luckily, it all passed by breakfast of the next day. The gig Friday in Steamboat Springs felt like a dream compared to the night before. I practically floated on a cloud up there.

Breckenridge definitely broke the rhythm of a tour that had been going relatively well. Not every day is a good one.