Deep breath

Here’s a shoutout to my lungs. Since the cold I caught a few weeks ago they behaved adequately during the day, allowing me to live my life with only mild fatigue and brain fog, but at night, the moment I lay down, they started hacking themselves up. I never really appreciated what a coughing fit was, but man, I do now. In my favorite book of all time, Jane Eyre, the saintly Helen Burns dies of consumption. Jane is by Helen’s side when she observes “a fit of coughing seized her, and after some minutes, she lay back, exhausted.” It sounded tragic, but romantically so. The fact is coughing fits are gross and alarming for both the victim and any hapless observers.

Anyway, I’d taken to getting into bed anticipating surfacing from sleep into a paroxysm of coughing. Nightly I found myself racing into the bathroom in order to not wake Sam. I was rarely successful. I was also bewildered. I had no fever, no cold symptoms other than a slightly stuffy nose. What was up?

I’ll tell you. Post nasal drip. Snot would creep down and tickle the back of my throat and suddenly I’d be coughing like I’d just chain-smoked twenty cartons of unfiltered Marlboros.

I can’t even express my delight that as of the day before yesterday, I can drift off to sleep without assuming that jolt into consciousness, gasping for air. And while I am tempted here to turn my thank you grim and topical- to say how I need deep lungfuls of air to express my feelings in this grim existential moment; how else am I going to wail like a banshee?- I will instead keep my gratitude loop limited to this basic, beautiful internal process of inhaling, exhaling, living.