One Thousand Words

I live with Hidradenditis Supperative, which is an immune system related skin disorder where your body just goes "hey, you know what'd be fun? Sprouting abscesses in erogenous zones!" and then you have to live with that from puberty until death.

I'm going on humira for it but haven't started yet.

My dermatologist put me on antibiotics for some active sites, then called me today to say that it's the wrong antibiotics based on swabs they took. So I'm waiting for the right antibiotic prescription to be filled.

But hand to god the stuff they've got me on has stirred up a bunch of tender but inactive sites and now they're coming to a head and I have pain instead of tenderness. Which is fun. I'm hoping the new antibiotic takes care of them, as well as the previously active lesions

But honestly I don't have high hopes. Antibiotics don't do much for HS unless the abscess/lesion is infected by outside bacteria (which my active draining lesions are, hence the swab results). They aren't infections in an of themselves. They're the body overreacting to something and sprouting an abscess with nothing in it but dead white blood cells (pus) but no bacteria. So we'll see what happens.

At least it'll take care of the active lesions? I hope? Maybe?

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Nikola, almost six, is an only child who never attended day care or much in the way of play groups. Pre-Kindergarten and its broad swath of germs and viruses hit him hard. Kindergarten is hitting him less hard, but that’s like saying getting struck down by a golf cart is better than being flattened by a fast moving freight train. You’re still on the ground counting your bones and wondering what hit you.

Niko has a gross cold that leaves him snotty (although he’s finally figuring out how to blow his nose) and with a nasty cough. I kept him home from school yesterday because the cough was disrupting his sleep and he was on edge and poorly. Then last night his cough progressed to triggering vomiting. Thankfully he knew what was up and called me in to help him and we kept the mess pretty contained, at least physically. But he doesn’t enjoy vomiting, or coughing excessively, or feeling out of control, especially at 1:30 in the morning. I mean, who does? So the coughing till he pukes events usually progress to crying till he coughs more and then pukes again. One of my mom jobs is to calm him down when he gets worked up (even when he’s healthy, as he has asthma) because crying can lead to coughing can lead to grossness.

I cleaned up the puke, got him calmed down, helped him blow his nose and drink some water, cranked up his humidifier, fluffed his pillows, and did everything else I could to help him sleep comfortably. I gave him the last of the liquid benedryl we have on hand because it can shrink swelling in nasal passages and dry up postnasal drip, helping ease coughing and make breathing easier. He declined the codeine cough syrup we have for him (it tastes like fire) but if he’s coughing this much again tonight I’m going to insist he take it. But other than that, there’s nothing I can do. I mean, I can sit up on the couch with him, supporting his body so he’s not lying down, and hope that helps his cough. I can push fluids into him during the day, and feed him chicken soup. I can take him to the doctor (where they’ll say “yup, that’s a cold, keep him hydrated. that’ll be $25 please.”). But I can’t really make him better.

Most cold remedies don’t work any better than a placebo, while also having some pretty severe side effects, especially for children. There’s nothing I can give Niko to make him all better. If I could pull the sickness out of his body and endure it myself I would. All I can do is try to make him comfortable and be thankful this isn’t Pertussis.

Pertussis, also known as Whooping Cough for the whooping sound of the coughs, or 100 day cough because of how long the illness usually lasts (10 weeks or longer, ie, over 2 1/2 months), is a highly contagious bacterial infection. It causes coughing so extreme that people wit it vomit, can break ribs, or become utterly exhausted. After coughing they can pass out; during coughing they can wet themselves, tear open arteries, burst capillaries in their eyes, or develop hernias. Infants don’t always develop the cough, sometimes they just stop breathing. Complications include pneumonia, encephalitis, and seizures. Despite the fact that a Pertussis vaccine was developed in the 1940s and has been proved resoundingly effective and safe, people are still rejecting it out of fear and misinformation. And so a disease that could be completely eradicated in the USA has pockets where it lives and strikes those most vulnerable to it, hospitalizing many of them and killing some of them.

Nikola will be sick for a week or two. He’ll probably miss 4-5 days of school (a school week). He’ll be gross and miserable and he’ll probably get this one or two more times this school year, and hopefully will get it less often next year. We’ll continue to treat him kindly and gently and help him use his inhaler so he can breathe better. He’ll be miserable and I’ll be miserable and I’ll lie awake at night listening to him cough and worrying, and listening to him NOT cough and worrying about THAT.

But it’s not Pertussis, at least.

That’s something.

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(content note: discussion of body hate, disordered eating, mental health issues, harassment, etc)

What is a microagression?

A microagression is a small, non-physical act that takes a negative, hostile, insulting, etc stance toward people of lower status. The term was originally used to refer to issues of race but is also sometimes used to describe similar actions with regards to gender and gender expression, class, ability status, etc.

On December 11th, Melissa McEwan started the hashtag #fatmicroaggressions on twitter “because I was having a moment of fedupedness with people pretending that fat people’s lived experiences are not spoken about, not known.”

I started college in 1997 when I was 18 and already pretty solidly in the grips of an eating disorder. If you’d asked me about it, I would have talked about diets and willpower and how unbelievably fat I was. At the time, I was still able to shop in “normal” clothing stores and wasn’t unbelievably fat. But adults had treated me, since childhood, as a massive disgusting fatbag one snack away from imploding from my own fatness. Didn’t I know how disgusting I was? Didn’t I know how cute I’d be if I’d only lose some weight? I look back at photos of myself as a kid, and sometimes I was a little chubby and sometimes I was skinny, but I wasn’t a fat kid. But adults around me were super quick to enforce the idea that I was a fat kid and fat kids were fundamentally worth less than non-fat kids. I think a lot of that was in reaction to the fact that my mom is fat… that they were trying to stage some sort of intervention to prevent me from going down the same (constantly dieting, constantly hungry, constantly hating herself) path she was on. And I internalized that. I took it as a given that I didn’t deserve clothing that fit properly or looked good, that I didn’t deserve to sit on the nice furniture for fear of breaking it, that I didn’t deserve people to treat me well, that I shouldn’t expect to ever find a husband or have kids (neither of which I was interested in at the time) unless I was willing to be strong and use my willpower to lose weight and get skinny. Because I was just lazy and indolent, that’s all, and all I needed to do was pay attention and count calories and measure things and work out and walk just a little bit and not so fucking much.

I stopped doing ballet (and tap and jazz) because my instructor told me I’d never be able to go en pointe, I was too fat. Too bad I don’t live in Russia or I could have joined Big Ballet, made up of dancers who weigh 220 lbs and up. I stopped doing tumbling/gymnastics because the instructor refused to help me get into positions she helped the other kids get into, and responded to my complaints of physical bullying (shoves, pokes, punches, and pinches of my little tummy) with an admonition to lose some weight (I was under ten years old). My pediatrician dismissed my mom’s concerns over my recurring ear infections, bronchitis (2-3x a year), and strep throat and advised her to put me on a diet. (When I turned 20 I got a new doctor who immediately had my tonsils removed. In the ensuing 14 years I’ve had bronchitis maybe 3 times total instead of 2-3 times a year. She also, worried about my weight, put me on an anti-depressant because it tended to suppress the appetite. She completely missed the part where I was incapacitated by Depression and Anxiety, but boy did she see my stomach and decide losing weight would do the trick. She missed the obvious signs of PCOS, too.)

By my senior year of high school, I was subsisting primarily on heavily caffeinated diet sodas. They were calorie free and filled me up sloshily and gave me energy which I needed because I was taking in so few calories. They also gave me horrible headaches thanks to the artificial sweeteners, but it was worth it, because no calories! I counted calories to the extreme, measuring out teaspoons of peanut butter for sandwiches and making hot cocoa with half the amount of the mix recommended. And when I was too hungry to keep doing it, when I’d been fasting for three or four days, I’d go on a binge and eat until I hurt while hating myself the entire time. I had excruciating nightmares for years about eating, would wake up racked with guilt from eating in dreams.

At some point in college I encountered the Venus of Willendorf and, possibly somehow through that, Marilyn Wann’s website Fat!So? which was a life changer. They both started me thinking in a very fundamentally different way about my body and my place in the world. I later discovered Intuitive Eating and Health At Every Size (HAES) and Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose and other blogs from the fatosphere.

I’m a lot healthier– and a lot fatter– now than I used to be. I rarely have my blood sugar drop so low I get shakey and nearly pass out. I haven’t fasted or binged in a long time. Keeping a food log can trigger incredibly unhealthy mindsets and behavior in me, but I can keep one if I need to (for instance, to be sure I’m taking in enough calories in a day). I still deal with stress by losing any inclination to eat, and sometimes realize that it’s almost bedtime and I’ve literally eaten nothing that day. I still have deep rooted problems, physical and mental, from the way people have treated me and my body for daring to exist as a fat person.

And I encounter similar problems pretty much every single day, people pre-judging me and my worth based on my size.

When I was pregnant, my first OB-GYN did not have a scale that went above 250 lbs. In order to weigh in, I had to leave his office, walk into a different office of a different doctor, and ask to use THEIR scale. I’ve had doctors fret that I was too heavy for their exam tables (I’m not). I’ve had medical staff refuse to use a larger sized blood pressure cuff (which skews my BP reading, making it register as abnormally high) or insist on using a thigh cuff (which is too big, and also gives a false reading… this time of too low). I’ve had many medical staff offer me exam gowns that were ridiculously small, because they simply don’t stock plus size gowns. When I had just delivered my child via C-Section, which is major abdominal surgery, and was still unable to feel anything from my chest down, I was expected to self-transfer from a gurney to a bed because the nurses didn’t want to touch my fat body. When I accidentally soiled myself (again, just had major abdominal surgery, had no sensation below the chest) they refused to clean me up and I lay there caked in feces for over an hour. When they DID clean me, they did an incredibly poor job. The morning nurse assumed I was simply incontinent and had regular bowel leakage because that’s just how fat people are. Medications, including birth control, are not tested on people over a certain size, resulting in fat people routinely being given the wrong dose of medication.

Every day that I leave my house I know I am going to be judged harshly by people. They are going to pull faces if I sit near them on the bus or train. They are going to be extra angry if I’m too slow crossing the street. People who see me with my kid assume I’m his aunt or nanny and not his mom. I know for a fact that I’m statistically likely to receive inferior medical care, that if I need an EMT they might stand around mocking my size instead of assisting me, or might post photos of me and insults to twitter or facebook. If I go into a grocery store, someone would feel it well within their rights to take photos of me and post them online with insults. In fact, there’s websites devoted to mocking people my size. People feel it acceptable and normal to casually insult me simply for existing, to judge me and find me wanting based solely on what they see.

I’m not going to pull that ridiculous “last acceptable prejudice” card or claim that anti-fat bias is somehow unique in the world of hatred and -isms. I’m also aware that as a white woman who usually doesn’t look obviously disabled I don’t get slammed with as much bias as other fat people in the world.

But still.

Every day I wake up and go out into a world that’s full of assholes. Every day I wake up and brace myself for absolute strangers to attack and deride me. Every day that I post something online i wait for the “lol ur fat” responses to roll in– and they frequently do.

So Melissa McEwan started this hashtag and people started posting under it. And some of it’s petty little shit like cashiers side-eying their Halloween Candy purchases and some of it’s bigger stuff like being denied birth control or having eating disorders and other medical issues go undiagnosed/untreated. And some people responded with WELL THAT ISN’T REALLY MICRO NOW IS IT.

I have 2 responses to that.

1) When you deal with toxic bullshit every single day, what should be a huge instance of hate and bias kind of sinks into a background noise. Pretty much every very fat person I know has had their medical concerns dismissed because they’re fat and “they just need to lose weight.” So on the one hand, that is (or should be) a huge fucking issue. On the other hand, it’s incredibly common. Almost every fat person I know dreads having to find a new doctor (or A doctor if they haven’t got one) because it means you’re probably going to have to shop around extensively just to find a person who treats you like a human being and not a gross sack of lipids. So a lot of the things mentioned under the hashtag? Are super huge things and not micro at all. But you know what? Those things are so common, so ubiquitous, and so many people feel they are deserved, that they just… lie there. Accepted. Acceptable.

2) It’s rare for the voices of fat people to be centered, to be heard, to be granted legitimacy. So fat folks see these kind of thing, and on twitter there’s very little barrier to entry, and suddenly… they’re entered into a conversation with other people who have Been There, who have Experienced That, who have Survived That, who Know How It Is. And the dam breaks. And all this fear and resentment and anger comes pouring out. Yes, there’s a difference between that woman on the bus who got up huffily after you sat down because your thigh touched hers and she didn’t want your gross fat cooties and the time you went to the doctor and he dismissed your questions about MS and advised you to eat more kale and lose weight, but at the same time, those exist on a spectrum of hate that affects all fat people and both are equally acceptable ways to react to fat people: with disgust, with anger that they exist, with dismissal. Just go away and don’t come back until you’re skinny.

The trolls, of course, have come out.

It’s easy to lose weight, they say. You’re just making excuses, they say. One asshole, whose entire account seemed to have been created solely to seek out and harass people who’d participated in the hash tag, tried to dismiss some of my claims. MAYBE THEY JUST SECRETLY HATE YOU.

Look.

Darling.

Sweet troll.

Precious little one.

It’s not a fucking secret.

It is socially acceptable and valid to hate people, to treat them as less than human, to consider them both worth less than thinner humans and also to consider them worthless.

That’s not a secret at all.

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In 2003 or 2004, I forget exactly when but it’s when I was still working at the bakery, Nesko had the day off. He drove me into work at super early in the morning. We were stopped at a red light, a woman in little shorts jogging slowly across the cross walk in front of us, when a guy in a pick up truck slammed into us from behind. We jerked forward a bit, and my left knee hit the front dashboard. I’m super anal about showing up to schedule shifts, so after exchanging insurance info Nesko dropped me off at the bakery and I worked a full shift. THEN we went to the ER (and filed an accident report). The docs gave us both pain killers and muscle relaxers for neck and back pain, but I didn’t mention anything about my knee. However, I’ve had pain in that knee ever since, pretty consistently. It’s like a grinding feeling. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something… bone chips?… floating around and grinding against things.

Niko’s started preschool and it’s 4 blocks (half a mile) away. On his second day of school, we meandered over there and got him settled in his classroom, and then I headed back home. About a block away I started fretting to myself about how my knee was hurting worse and worse and that my right hip was starting to hurt because I was walking a bit funny, almost limping. I turned into the alley behind our building as a bit of a short cut. I was within sight of our back fence, about two buildings down, when suddenly I felt a snap and my knee was replaced with searing, blinding pain. I staggered to the side, unable to support my weight, and then managed to hop over and lean against somebody’s garage door, gasping and cussing.

It was pretty awful.

I managed to hop, hobble, and lurch to our fence, where I found an old fence post and used that as a sort of crutch thing to get me up to the house. I dragged myself up the back stairs. I’ve been in pain ever since.

Fortunately, my plan of staying off it as much as possible is paying off. Every day it’s hurting less. It hurts less this afternoon than it did in the middle of the night when I woke up to pee, which hurt less than it did that evening before going to bed, etc. I’m healing. And I’m super lucky that our house mate has been able to take Niko to school and pick him up again, letting me just sit around and convalesce.

I don’t have insurance, or I’d have called 911 right there in the alley and had an ambulance come get me. I don’t have insurance, but will be covered in November through Nesko’s new job. All I need is for my body to hold on for 3 more months. But stuff keeps blowing up and costing money and time and etc. Come on, body! Hold it together!

In retrospect, I think I stepped funny and sprained my knee. It feels a lot like what happened years and years ago when I stepped awkwardly off a ledge I didn’t know was there and felt a similar snap in my ankle. It wasn’t broken, just badly sprained, and time and coddling did most of the healing. I’m hoping that’s what’ll happen with my knee, but plan on going out and picking up a cane or something this weekend. And my knee’s just moved higher on my “get this checked out ASAP” list. Sorry, funny looking mole! You’re not causing me pain so you’re getting downgraded!

I’ve noticed that my knee’s been hurting a lot more since my whole face swelled up from my teeth going bad. It’s like I get a little inflammation somewhere and then my whole body goes to hell, everything swelling and hurting and acting up. If I could trade this fleshy shell in for something cybernetic I absolutely would.

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I was awoken this morning in what I would have called pre-child-having the worst way to wake up, but now that I have a kid I know that the WORST way to wake up is to surprise vomit or other bodily fluids. So this is now ranked second, but it’s still awful. Namely, I woke up with a horrible Charley Horse in my calf.

I get them sometimes. Most people do. I got them more often when I was a teenager. Once, the searing pain woke me and I lashed my leg out, slamming my foot against the poured concrete wall of the room I was sleeping in, nearly breaking bones in my foot. Another time I literally woke up screaming, which alarmed Nesko to no end because I wasn’t fully awake and could just kind of roar incoherently at him and he thought my appendix was exploding or something. Good times!

This morning’s wasn’t horrifically bad, and I’m pretty sure it was caused by the fact that the temperature dropped over night and my leg was sticking out from under the cozy covers and the muscle got chilled and them cramped. I stretched it out a bit and was able to fall back asleep and it feels pretty ok now.

Once I had a limp for two days from the strength of the cramp. What the helllll, body.

We’ve been doing lots of drawing and coloring around here lately, and I’m going to go now and help Niko create a gallery wall in the living room of his dinosaur masterpieces.

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You’ve probably seen the latest Dove viral ad campaign. It’s a video available on you tube about how totally awesome Dove is because of their decade long “Real Beauty” campaign and how now they’re going after the people who are REALLY evil: “art directors, graphic designers, and photo retouchers.” Not ad executives and companies, no. Just those evil artists who for reasons TOTALLY UNKNOWN make women feel bad ON PURPOSE about their bodies. But how to “catch them in the act!!!” and “make them reconsider”? They needed a plan! So they created a Photoshop Action and released it into the wild, where it will be used by amateurs who want to make wedding and baby photographs look better. Billed as a “skin glow effect” they posted it on reddit and other places where art directors, graphic designers, and professional photo retouchers TOTALLY hang out and get their totally professional Photoshop Actions, Brushes, etc from.

In reality, all the Action does is revert all changes made to the original image and pop up a scolding message.

Don’t manipulate our perceptions of real beauty.

Of course, to undo that reversion, all one has to do is hit… well… undo.

BAM! A totally effective message that will OBVIOUSLY CHANGE THE WORLD FOREVER!

Or, more likely, go viral and make Dove look totally awesome and progressive because they just love women so much and are so willing to take on those horrible evil photo retouchers who are just the WORST, right?

Dove, remember, is owned by Unilver which has those atrocious Axe commercials (women! they are fuck beasts for fucking!) and SlimFast (women: you are fat cows, stop eating!). If they really wanted to push for long acting real social change, they could apply pressure to Unilver to at the very least stop marketing Axe the way it’s marketed.

Of course, they could also change their own advertising as well.

I mean, if Dove really thinks womens’ bodies are beautiful and we should all stop altering our perceptions of real beauty, maybe they shouldn’t find new body parts for women to be ashamed of? I, for one, never knew my armpits were ugly until Dove told me so.

If Dove really thinks womens’ bodies are beautiful and we should all stop altering our perceptions of real beauty, they wouldn’t market Firming Creams, and their criteria for casting calls wouldn’t be quite as shameful (beautiful skin and hair only! No zits or scars, those are GROSSSSSSSS).

If Dove (and Unilever) really thinks womens’ bodies are beautiful and we should all stop altering our perceptions of real beauty, they wouldn’t market skin-lightening creams (which are physically as well as emotionally harmful) around the world.

Like diet companies who co-opt HAES and Size Acceptance verbage, and companies who practice Greenwashing, Dove is taking Body Acceptance language and using it to sell product. They are telling women what they think women want to hear for the sole reason that they want to sell products to those women. There’s nothing inherently wrong with companies advertising their wares. What’s wrong is the incredibly hypocritical advertising Dove uses. They aren’t trying to change the world, but they very willing to use social justice and activism language to sell their products and their subtle form of body hate. Dove doesn’t give a shit about your body or how beautiful you feel, they just want your money.

One of the worst things is that Dove is actually in a position to make actual changes in the industry. Instead of telling everyone that we should pat them on the back for promoting size acceptance and bodily diversity (while actually showing a pretty narrow range of sizes and skin colors), they could just use a wide variety of women of different body types and ethnicities. They could show instead of telling. They could push for Unilever to do the same with other ad campaigns as well. And they could pressure Unilever to drop the body shaming, sexist, manipulative language and images that other Unilever products use. But Dove isn’t doing that. Instead, they’re creating viral videos that do the bulk of advertising for them (saving them money) and creating good will among their users. It’s an effective ad campaign, but it’s also an insulting one.

Dove claims that they’re against distorting perceptions of beauty, which is harmful to women, while telling women that their armpits are ugly and their skin is saggy and their scars are gross and their frizzy hair is uggsville and their dark/uneven skin is THE WORST, but hey it’s ok because they can spend money on products to make them prettier YAY GIRL POWER WOOOOO now how about a nice round of SlimFast for all? The hypocrisy is thick on the ground.

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I get migraines, sometimes.

They usually aren’t too bad– a sudden and searing whiplash of pain through my brainmeats, sometimes painful enough to literally stagger me, a LOT of visual stuff, and then it’s gone. They usually only last a few minutes, I rarely have confusion or nausea or anything lingering afterward. Lucky, right?

Except Tuesday evening my head started hurting. I lay down for bed with Niko and it just hurt worse and worse and worse, too badly to sleep. I took Excedrin with a coke and stayed up for a bit until it abated enough for me to go to sleep, slept in a bit the next morning, and spent the day stumbling around with nausea, mild aphasia, and an attack of the clumsies. And a sick headache that eventually ebbed around 10pm.

I haven’t had a bad headache for that long since 2004, when one stressful evening I retired to a dark bedroom with frozen peas draped over my eyes.

It’s coming back, like a bunch of stiletto blades jamming into my forehead, and I can smell this artificial, powdery, fake-candle chemical type smell everywhere. It’s like it’s clinging to me. Either it’s causing the headache (and yes, some smells, especially chemical perfume smells and stargazer lillies, can cause blinding headaches) or the sensation of smelling it is being caused by the headache. I’m not sure which, but it’s kind of creepy.

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I dropped about $30 at Payless on a pair of Safe-T Step black laceup shoes that are aimed, I think, at people who work in kitchens and warehouses and will in general be on their feet all day. I’m wearing them around the house right now to break them in, and tonight I’ll wear them on the half-mile walk to tutoring. I was riding around in the car today in my canvas shoes, unable to feel my toes because it was so cold, so we’ll see how these shoes hold up. the 8.5W were much too tight and the 9W are a little loose, but hopefully that means I can wear these shoes with 1) an insole and 2) thicker socks and not have any problems.

This is not the ultimate solution to my shoe needs. These are vinyl shoes and they WILL wear out soon. But they are something that can bide me over until I can get “real” shoes and they will work both as an office shoe and as a walking shoe, if I ever manage to get a job.

When it gets warmer, I’m going to try and get a pair of New Balance shoes. A lot of people have recommended them, but I’ve had bad experience with them wearing down and rubbing my feet in weird ways (like, blister-to-open-sore-in-minutes rubbing, and my feet/heels are INCREDIBLY calloused so blisters AT ALL are rare). I’ll see if I can’t find a different style or something. But this spring and summer I’m going to be doing a LOT of walking, since the closest parks are a mile away, the library is over half a mile away, the zoo is free, and I don’t have a driver’s license.

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I spent most of yesterday running a 100.4* fever, which is enough to make me really stupid and tired and out of it. Over the course of the day– which, let me remind you, was spent ENTIRELY ON MY OWN WITH A TODDLER because Nesko wound up spending over 30 hours at work, finally getting home after we were asleep– I managed to cut myself, burn myself, tear the knee of a nearly new pair of pyjama pants, drop a whole lot of food on the floor at different times, close my hand in a door, and hit my head on the fridge. I was in rare form.

I also became obsessed with the snow caked on our window screens, and opened a window to try and knock the snow off the screen. Only the snow had gotten between the screen and the window, so when I opened the window, dirty snow fell all over the window sill and the wood floor. Did you know that squirrels sit on our window ledges and poop? They do. I got squirrel poop in our house. :C

I should be less of a hot mess today, although we are running out of food and food-like substances. None of the side streets or alleys have been cleared out yet so they are all choked with snow… 2-4 feet of snow, depending on where they are. Nesko got home to our general vicinity in good time last night, but then was driving around for about an hour looking for a place to put his car. He couldn’t get down or street OR down our alley (which had a 5 foot drift of snow along one end of it). He wound up parking 2-3 blocks away and walking home. I think he’s going to have to do the same tonight. Hopefully he can stop for groceries on the way home.

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I haven’t been super bloggy lately because I’ve been sick. I spent about 2 weeks with a cold that turned into what almost was bronchitis except that my terrible horrible no good very bad cough that was more like a fit, a paroxysm, of coughing that lasted for a minute or longer and left me gagging and retching and almost puking (and once I threw up in my mouth totally ugh) and barely unable to catch my breath afterward were… completely nonproductive. My lungs weren’t congested, my nose wasn’t stuffed up, I had no snots, no sinus problems, I was producing no phlegm. I was just coughing. I was coughing so much my throat was raw and hurting from the coughing.

And then I started getting better and I had about a week where I was almost entirely symptom free except I kept suddenly spiking a fever of 100* or so. My normal body temperature is 97.9*, just FYI.

And then Thursday or Friday (I forget when, exactly; I’m exhausted and not remembering things clearly) I started feeling ill again and seemed to be developing the exact same cold only this time? My lungs and sinuses are full of crap.

And I’m again with the terrible paroxysms of coughing, and I’m sleeping on the couch because I don’t want to wake up the guys (who have colds of their own) and this cough is seriously going to kill me.

It comes on if I’m lying down, lounging, propped up, sitting upright, standing, walking around, doing dishes, taking a hot and steamy shower, drinking water, blowing my nose, sucking on a menthol action cough drop. Using my inhaler helps me breathe a bit (I can feel the difference in my lungs after) but doesn’t really stop the cough at all; taking antacids etc (in case it’s “silent” GERD) doesn’t help; cough suppressants don’t really help (I HAVE TRIED SO MANY DRUGS INTERNETS SO MANY); expectorants don’t really help; staying hydrated, keeping my nose blown, and taking allergy medication helps a tiny bit; this has been going on for weeks and weeks and seriously. I can’t keep doing this.

I was in a different room, coughing, and woke Niko up that is how loud I was coughing.

I went on the internet, turning to the warm embrace of Dr. Google.

Did you know that there is totally pertussis in Chicago? And that about half the cases of whooping cough don’t have that characteristic WHOOP inhale, especially in adults? And that my cough sounds almost exactly like recordings of whooping cough I have heard online? AND THAT OBVIOUSLY I HAVE PERTUSSIS OH MY GOD.

I am fairly freaked out about this, and trying to remain calm and also trying to remember if my booster shot 3 years ago was for tetanus ONLY, or was DTaP, and hey, Nesko isn’t THIS sick and he’s apparently got the same thing as me and it’s highly unlikely that HE would have a shitty cold and I would get whooping cough and I am SO INCREDIBLY GLAD that Niko is up to date on his shots. Because I would not wish this on anyone let alone a small child who comes up to me when I’m spasmodically coughing and choking on the bed with white foam dripping out of my mouth, and pats me on the back comfortingly.

Another thing is, I have coughed until I puked before. I used to get bronchitis twice a year and I am an old hand at The Cough That Will Not Die, that produces thick wads of blood-streaked pustulant mucus, that causes gaggy retchy vomiting, that pulls abdominal muscles and leaves one sore. In many ways, this cough is similar. It probably is the same old same old, just slightly different. BUT. I swear, it feels different. My fever is nowhere near as high. My body and joints don’t hut as much. Sitting upright isn’t a help. I’m not drowning in snot. I mean, I was really snotty for like a day and a half, don’t get me wrong. I used up 1.5 boxes of tissues. I’m still producing mucus. It’s scanty, but it’s there. But it is not bronchitis level ropes and gobs of stuff. Which is kind of, you know, bronchitis is incredibly disgusting. But this feels like a different animal.

I’m going to try and hit a take-care clinic tomorrow (if nothing else I am going to try and get a fresh scrip for both my inhaler (oh god so expensive!) and metformin). I’m also going to try and record this croupy barking draining cough just in case I can’t produce one on command. It’s really freaky sounding.