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new way of coughing
Wednesday, March 9 2016
Today was the third in a row that I mostly spent reclined on couches. My fever never reached as high as it had yesterday, though whenever the ibuprofen weakened it would occasionally rise over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Meanwhile, a mass of warm air had come into the area, raising outdoor temperatures as high as 80 degrees. Gretchen opened the basement doors to dump out the winter chill lingering in there like water in a cistern. Her childhood friend Dina would be visiting on Friday, and she also needed to de-felinate the air. Oscar and Celeste spend a lot of time down there, and Dina is highly allergic to cat dander.
The weather was so nice that, despite my weakness, I shambled into the forest this afternoon just to visit the woodpiles I'd made at the Chestnut Oak/White Ash salvage just up the Chamomile from the Stick Trail. I also tinkered with a cairn, adding some spindly additional height with carefully-balanced stones. If someone would design skyscrapers to resemble cairns, cities would look truly lovely in the distance. These are the things one does and thinks about when weakened by fever.
Later Gretchen and I went for a short walk down the Farm Road in the post-sunset gloom. I expected the Spring Peepers to emerge in force given the balmy conditions. But they weren't to be fooled. There were, however, enough moths flitting about that I had to close my laboratory window. I'd briefly mustered enough strength to work on a job application, but soon I had to retreat to the living room couch on a wave of nausea, a symptom I'd yet to experience with this illness.
I haven't been this sick in perhaps 25 years, since recovering from a bout of pneumonia back in my early 20s. One of the most unpleasant symptoms of this illness has been the coughing, which is a mostly dry and unproductive rasp. More often than not, coughing dislodges tiny chunks of mucous that do not actually end up expectorated, and when they linger in the windpipe, they cause unpleasant rattles and wheezes. I try to correct this by coughing deeper and harder, but often I'm completely unsuccessful. This evening, though, I discovered a technique to ensure that all the stray bits of thick mucous in my lungs get expectorated. The key is to exhale all the air in the lungs, deflating down to a ghostly moan, then fully inflate the lungs, and then cough. Something about getting rid of all the air causes the loose bits of mucous to come together and form larger globs, which are then easier to cough loose.
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