Flu Chronicles: I Wore a Holstein Hat

As I am writing this, I’m trying to keep myself from coughing. If I take short breaths and ignore the fact that my chest feels like Dumbo is sitting on it, I can do it. Except for when old Dumbo waves his tail in my face and I feel the need to sneeze; then I “let ‘er blow” and begin hacking uncontrollably. I contort and retch in ways Linda Blair could never manage. My biggest fear is that I’ll pee my pants. Oh, you know you’ve been there. When I finally manage to tame the great alveoli annihilator, one of those Mucinex commercial characters---a blob wearing a hardhat and carrying a lunch box--- I go back to shallow breaths and hope Dumbo keeps his tail in check.

Interestingly, my dog seems to have a cold too. He’s been sneezing like crazy and it’s really ruining my concentration. Staying focused on not coughing becomes quite difficult when a golden retriever is reverse snorting in your face. I don’t know what his problem is, but he’s been walking around here acting like he just did a line of cayenne. I feel like I need to paint “Quarantine” in red letters on a white sheet and hang it off of my front porch, but I can’t move because I’ll start coughing and probably pee my pants. Hopefully people will just be deterred by the sounds coming from within my house.

I have a weird coping mechanism when I’m very sick or in a lot of pain, I joke around. In college, I dislocated my shoulder making a malt for a chemistry professor. No lie---I worked in a place called the “Dairy Bar” and when I turned around to ask him if he wanted extra chocolate, I forgot to move my malt mixing arm and “pop” out it came. My still attached arm grabbed my dangling arm and I squealed “excuse me,” went out the backdoor, put my back against a milk cooler and slid to the floor. I remember there was quite a debate about who would take me to the ER. Some unlucky kid in a hairnet lost. He was much smaller than I and had to push me up into the big white ice cream van. Thank goodness, I didn’t lose my balance and fall on top of him. That’s not how I wanted to end up in the student newspaper.

At the ER, after trying to get the receptionist to take me seriously even though I was wearing a cockeyed, Holstein-patterned (black and white cow print) baseball cap, I filled out mountains of paperwork with my left hand and finally got into a room. My arm was completely numb----total dead arm. Anticipating the pain of returning bone to socket, I went into funny mode, cracking jokes about whatever I could think of. I remember specifically joking about my brother, who was on his way to pick me up. He was being a good little brother, and I was using him for comic fodder. I have no idea what I said because after they gave me some painkillers my comedy act took on a life of its own. It’s all a bit fuzzy, of course, but I know the nurse had to readjust her hold on the sheet a few times because she was laughing---they had wrapped my arm in a sheet and the doctor was on one end and the nurse was on the other. The theory was that when they both pulled, my shoulder would somehow slip back into place. It makes no sense to me. Maybe it was a weird student health experiment or prank, and I, the crazy girl in the cow cap, was the butt of the joke. Eventually they upped my medication, perhaps in an attempt to silence my amazing routine. I have no memory of how it went down, but luckily the sheet trick worked, and my arm was back to malt making a few days later. I did, however, have to apologize to my brother because the medical staff knew a number of his embarrassing childhood stories.

Hey, this is working. I haven’t coughed in some time. I wonder if I should tell you about the time I fainted down half a flight of stairs because I thought I had a blood clot in my leg. Turns out it was just a bruise and a wicked sinus infection. I don’t know, that one’s a little too scary. What about the time when my five-year-old self woke up and thought I was blind because my eyes had matted shut---or the time I was sure I had Tietze syndrome because WebMD told me so or when I laughed and laughed at the doctor who told me that the muscle relaxants he was prescribing for my back spasm might work so well I could poop unexpectedly--upon hearing my giggles, he looked at me very seriously and said “I’m not kidding.”

Maybe I’ll tackle those stories after I google Benadryl dosage for dogs and Bic pen chest tube DIY.

Live, laugh, love...cough.