Oh, it sure took me back. All the hacking and wheezing. The cracking coughs that sounded like out-of-balance cement trucks tumbling blocks of granite. The heavy feeling in my chest like somebody was standing on my rib cage. No, like someone had taken up residence in my lungs. Maybe moths. Maybe squirrels. Clogging up my bronchial tubes, fluttering about, making me cough horrible, painful coughs.
Good memories of childhood, it was.
My daughter has bronchitis, and after two weeks of sounding like Barry White and beginning conversations with, “My darling I … HACK! HACK! WHEEZ! WHEEZ! (pound on chest),” I decided to go see the doctor myself. I hate admitting defeat, and that I can’t cure a cold with OJ and sheer willpower.
The doctor listened to my chest, pressed on my forehead and pronounced me a moron for waiting so long before seeking medical assistance. (Don’t you always feel a sense of guilt or shame or embarrassment when you have to explain why you didn’t come sooner? If you’re like me, you think up elaborate excuses and then fudge how long you’ve been sick: “It’s just a couple days since I started coughing up blood and turning purple. I would have come in, but there were wild dogs loose in my neighborhood.”)
Anyway, my daughter and I have been limping through it together while my wife thinks about quarantining us in the attic. Someone asked her how she was doing — if she was getting sick, too. “Me?” she said. “I’m a mother. A mother can’t afford to get sick. Who’s going to take care of these two sad sots?”
The child and I looked at each other with crusty runny noses. We tried to hold back meek coughs, but they sputtered out.
I sympathize with the little one, as it’s tough being sick at any age, but especially when you’re five. I can’t remember how many times I was sick with bronchitis as a kid. It seemed like it was constant — chronic even. I had asthma, bad allergies and my lungs sounded like sickly bag pipes, always wheezing and whistling like they were trying to serenade a fancy lady.
Nights were the worst, and I would cough myself awake. It would wake my mother, too, and that was bad. I knew when I heard the creaking of the floor upstairs and the sound of her feet on the spiral staircase that I was about to enjoy one of those wonderful 1970s home remedies for dislodging gunk in a child’s lungs. (Most of these, I should add, have been outlawed by the Geneva Convention.)
“We’ve got to break that mucus up,” she would tell me — the kind of thing every child dreams of hearing their parent say.
We’ve got to what?!? We’re not breaking anything up!
Sometimes she would use the palm of her hand to whack me on the back like I was a stubborn ketchup bottle refusing to give up that one, final drip. Or I would hear from the kitchen the sounds of pots and pans clinking together as she concocted one of her magic elixirs — usually a super-heated mug of honey, lemon and whisky. It’s why hair grows on the bottom of my feet even today.
Nothing like sitting in bed in the middle of the night with a hot toddy and your mother pounding on your back while saying, “Drink your whisky. We’re breaking that mucus up!”
Where was Child Services?
But she worried about me getting pneumonia, and it probably did the trick. I always slept like a baby after that. Sometimes for days!
I’m thankful my daughter has never gone through such bad bouts of bronchitis (or early exposure to whisky.) Hers is pretty mild in the grand scheme of things, and we’re both on the mend. But getting sick also helps you appreciate what it means to be well. And how much we take it for granted. I know I have, and I realized that as I thought back to those miserable days when I was a kid.
Thank goodness they’re gone, and thank goodness I never have to drink another hot toddy.