Sick as a dog

Sums up my current condition. For the past 1-2 weeks, I've been having dizzy spells in my sleeping and waking moments. I felt the whole room spinning around violently, and there were fleeting moments when I thought I was going bonkers or blind! Little bro diagnosed my condition as BPPV - Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, caused by problems in the inner ear.

Before I've even fully recovered from BPPV, I was attacked by a hacking cough that has been keeping me awake for the past 3 nights. The condition is exacerbated by a stuffy nose which now makes it impossible for me to taste my food. Not that I have much of an appetite anyway, the cough makes me feel like throwing up half the time.

After a trip to the office to clear some urgent work, I went home and crashed on my bed. Never felt so tired, awful and sickly! Dear P cooked some yummy porridge the night before - check it out.

On a sidenote, ever wondered why the expression "sick as a dog" is used? Why not sick as a rabbit or sick as a zebra? Apparently, dogs had negative connotations attached to them in the past...

There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin — big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

The modern sick as a parrot recorded from the 1970s — at one time much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon — refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sic1.htm.