My nights have been the worst. I take two NyQuil tabs with the expectation that they will dry me up and put me down, but nope, these bright green OTC bubbles of gel, evoking memories of the Vapo-Rub my mother rubbed under my nose as a child, have become pretty much useless to me, a placebo that no longer works because I no longer believe.
Instead of the old NyQuil slide into temporary oblivion (and even when it works, it’s always too temporary, snapping you back into full consciousness five hours later, forcing you to decide whether to take a second dose that will knock you out into mid-morning), I now lay in bed listening with clinical exasperation to the crunchy rattle in my lungs, knowing that I can’t really ignore it for long because I am going to have to take a deep breath, and then hack the irritating mucus out of my lungs for a moment of relief.
My coughs have the rhythm of deep ocean swells - hack, hack, haaaaack, KAAACK, hak hak hak hak - and I know they are heard by my wife as she tries to sleep and I feel terrible about it and want to say to her, “It’s not my fault, I’m sorry, but please don’t resent me over something I cannot control!”
But I don’t say it because, with wifely grace, she is not visibly reacting to my expectorations. She pretends that she is in deep deep sleep and she silently forgives me for my sad condition because that is the deal we struck with each other 36 years ago.
She only indulges in a single “told you so” moment when I tell her this morning that I will go to the urgent care place down the road for better drugs. “That’s what I suggested yesterday,” she says quickly before disappearing into the bathroom, and she is right, of course.
I don’t know why I didn’t go yesterday other than that I was still deeply fatigued and hopeful that this malady was going to run its course. I was also committed to taking my mother to her guitar lesson (I passed on it myself) and then to the tax assessor’s office to register her Arkansas car in Texas, so I imagine I was trying to preserve my strength.
(“Preserve my strength?” I have to pause for a second here to say that this whole discussion, as I write it, amuses me greatly because I’m writing about a cold as if I am persevering through Stage 3 sinus cancer. A few years back, I shared with my friend Randy some of my diary entries about a poker trip to Vegas and in his usual way, he sneered and said, “All this about a card game?” To which I should have said (and say to you now), “I work with what I have. There can be profundity in banal things.”)
Back to my health. What ultimately prompted me to see the doctor was something on Thursday night that had never happened to me before. I was dreaming about something - I don’t remember what - when the feed … glitched. It was like I had flipped my television to one of the old paywall scrambled shows where you needed a cable converter box to unscramble the images. Instead of dreamstate linearity, I felt like I was inside a lava lamp.
I have done little reading on dreams, but as I have aged, I have become more conscious of the extraordinary storytelling work your subconscious brain does while you are in REM sleep. Story arcs, set design, soundtracks, dialogue - it’s all there within the boundaries of what your mind can understand and accept. It’s really remarkable.
In fact, my theory about great artists is that they have the capacity to tap into that dream overdrive while conscious, as the rest of us only enjoy (or fear) those stories in the one-seat theater of our minds.
But nothing at all? Jumbled shapes in random motion drifting in and out of my line of dreamsight while my subconscious is turning knobs and flipping reset switches, reboot, reboot, reboot. It was awful and alarming and felt like a little glimpse of insanity.
All because of a cold.
So I made an appointment and went to the urgent care clinic at 10:00 a.m. I like this clinic - no wait, a reasonable copay, and a no-nonsense nurse practitioner with a nice smile who has treated me before for cuts and foot pain and, yes, colds. She said, “Hello again!” which I liked, and after I described my miserable week, she said. “Well, let’s take care of that,” which I also liked, and she prescribed a Z Pac, some Prednisone, some cough syrup and an inhaler.
“That’s that,” she said and she told me to come back if it didn’t work and so, having a half-hour to kill while waiting for the scrips to be filled, I decided to get a long-overdue pedicure on my gnarly feet, because why not?
It’s 9:30 p.m. now and I have a long shift tomorrow at the polling place in East Pearland (my last one, thank goodness) and the real drugs seem to be making some progress. I am still breathing with crunch, but less so, and the cough syrup will almost certainly send me into slumber and hopefully the night shift has worked out the glitches and they will have a good story for me to savor in my one-seat theater tonight.
And I may get my first tattoo after this week. It will be on the side of my right index finger next to my thumb and it will say in small letters, “Now, not later,” which is unexpectedly profound, a mantra for procrastinators, whether for doing work or doing exercise or seeking medical assistance sooner.
Now, not later. Words to live by.
Postscript: After I wrote this, I read this article about dream generation. Bottom line: we have theories, but no one really knows. I think I prefer that.
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