Cough. Hack. Wheeze. Sniffle. Gurgle. Sneeze. Shiver. Repeat process, again and again until drifting off to a peaceful transitional death seems like a welcome relief. I am SO sick I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t speak, I can’t sleep, all I’ve been doing is coughing like a maniac until it feels like my eyes are going to pop out of their sockets from the pressure.
Please, could someone just shoot me immediately? Two behind the left ear ought to do it. Feel free to keep my ’I (heart) Uranus’ bumper stickers and ’Schlitz Happened!’ shirts as my tokens of thanks, and I hope you can do a lot better with my concepts than I have. It hurts just to breathe at this point, and I’ve coughed so much my throat is like raw meat.
I’m a legendary weenie-wuss (or is it wuss-weenie?) when it comes to having anything even close to do with being under the weather, and this is about as under it as I care to be. Good thing I’ve been mostly illness free for the better part of my life, or I’d really be in a bad way. It’s not often I’ve had to fight my way through something that hurts this much.
It could be pneumonia back for another visit, as I’ve had it before. Or, it could be some leftover throat gunk from someone’s innards who breathed in my face or shook my hand after a comedy show in the last week, and saturated my usually frighteningly healthy pair of pink lungs with the black jungle rot tar of death that left me in the shape I’m in now.
I don’t think it’s my infected tonsils, even though my throat feels like I’ve been packing it with Brillo pads and insulation for the past couple of days. My cough is too intense. It’s completely annoying, even to me, and I didn’t want to subject anyone else to it so I didn’t go home last night after the radio show. I got a hotel room instead, so I could rest quietly.
Well, quietly for me anyway. I have no idea how infectious any of this is, but I figured it must be, even a little, if I got it. Who drooled on me in the last week or so? That could be anyone, but I’m not going to live like Howard Hughes and not shake anyone’s hand. That just isn’t how I roll. I mingle and visit and sign autographs, or whatever I’m asked to do.
Radio was totally rough last night, and I felt like was torturing whatever listeners we did have with my raspy hack, and I had to shut my microphone off countless times to get that deep painful cough low enough in my throat to scratch the itch so I could keep on talking. I apologized to the co-hosts, but what else could I do? We needed to get through our time.
I’ve got a nice variety of lozenges and cough drops now and my old standby from early radio days, Fisherman’s Friend. I also bought some Nyquil type knockoff that I’m hoping will at least let me snooze for a few hours. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so low.
I really do need to get some kind of health insurance coverage. If this jungle rot doesn’t kill me, I’m right at the age where they start prowling my poop shoot with colonoscopies, prostate exams and that occasional extra money run as a drug mule through that prison on the Turkish border I keep getting postcards from. I only hope I live that long. I feel rotten.
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