Last Thursday I woke up with a mostly dry but insistent cough with a little wheeze at the end. I felt otherwise fine and went to work.
The next day, I rode my bike to work in a downpour, and a few hours later, began to feel extremely weak and chilled. I would have lain down on the floor of my cube if I didn’t know how many cookie and potato chip crumbs are ground into the carpet. Well, I don’t know the exact number, but I know it’s a lot.
I finally had to ask my boss if I could go home, which involved another bike ride in the pouring rain.
At home I mopped my bike off with cloth rags, and took a hot bath to try to warm up, only somewhat satisfactory, as my tub isn’t quite large enough for total submersion.
I got in bed at 3 p.m. and stayed there until the next morning, alternately feeling like I was freezing and boiling, plus I was faintly nauseous.
By 7:30 a.m. Saturday, I hadn’t eaten for 20 hours, and a couple of eggs sounded good, but cooking them sounded impossible. Just then, fortunately, I heard Tom walking about overhead and called him up.
“Are you by any chance getting ready to make an omelet?” I asked.
“I could!” he said.
And in half an hour, he appeared at my door with a tasty omelet on a warmed plate, a muffin with butter and jam, and an orange divided into segments and arranged attractively around the curve of the plate.
Isn’t he tremendously kind? That was immensely great of him.
David and Lisa had arrived a day or two earlier for their first visit to San Francisco since moving to Seattle in September, and we had planned to get together Saturday afternoon at four.
I thought I would sleep until two, take a shower, and then see how I felt. But even taking a shower was out of the question, and Tom had to go off without me.
My back was starting to ache from lying in bed so much, so I got up and did some reading (Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma; it's delightful), and in the evening, I watched Sunday Bloody Sunday, about a woman (Glenda Jackson) who is involved with a man who is also involved with another man, an arrangement known to all but not necessarily entirely satisfactory.
This movie features Daniel Day-Lewis’s very first screen performance, as a bratty kid who scratches the side of a car with a piece of glass.
During the evening, Tom called to say the gang was at Chef Jia’s for dinner, and would I like him to bring anything back for me? Just as Sunday Bloody Sunday ended, he knocked on my door with an order of bean curd, bless his heart yet again.
That night I got a stabbing pain in my sinuses, which hung around for a few hours, on top of everything else.
“Lord,” I addressed my Maker. “I apologize for having thought I was an atheist all these years. Please call me home. I’m ready.”
Yesterday I felt considerably better. I was still coughing, but the ton-of-bricks feeling was gone, and it occurred to me that maybe I could still see David and Lisa! Indeed, that worked out; I took some of all the cough medicines in the hall closet (only two, an expectorant and a suppressant, but “all” sounds more exciting than “two”) and Tom and I met them at Caffe Greco on Columbus for a very pleasant interlude of two hours or so.
In the evening, Tom and I watched The Last of the Mohicans. This was the film that established Daniel Day-Lewis as a sex symbol, purportedly, but I think he’s far more attractive now than he was then. I also thought his love scenes with Madeleine Stowe lacked chemistry, and his American accent slipped in moments of stress. From that movie alone, you can’t tell he’s one of the best actors of all time.
I assumed I would go to work today, but it turned out that this hateful little flu had yet another twist up its sleeve, which was that last night, coughing caused something in the vicinity of my rib cage to give way most painfully, and then I spent the rest of the night trying, unsuccessfully, not to cough, and periodically getting up to go online to read about coughs, cough suppression and rib cage pain.
So today I felt worse again and didn’t go to work, after all. I spoke to my doctor’s assistant and she said the pain was probably due to a pulled muscle, and since the cough is not particularly productive, it would be appropriate to use a cough suppressant.
Later I talked to my mother, who said, “I have some advice for your cough. When you feel a cough coming on, put the heel of your hand on your forehead between your eyebrows.”
“Really?”
“Yes—this will help prevent wrinkles from forming.”
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