A Touch of the Black Lung: A Mid-Winters Tale

Cute pic of me totally thriving this Winter! xo

I believe that most women who are single and of a certain age are, like me, are for the most part, accustomed to being alone. Its not that we don’t want to have a partner, someone to go through the ups and downs of this wacky world with, its just that because God loves us less, and decided that we’re unworthy of regular bone sessions and unconditional love and support because we’re garbage people, we’ve become conditioned to take care of shit by ourselves. We’re the ones who drag the trash through knee deep snow drifts. We buy the groceries. Rush our pets to the vet in the middle of the night and handle those nightmares solo. We take the car to the repair shop and figure out how to get home in a rural area without a working vehicle. When the basement overflows with sewage, spewing from every pipe and causing you to have to buy 11 boxes of FRESH STEP kitty litter in order to soak it all up, we’ll we’re the monsters who go and purchase that. WE. HAVE. TO. HANDLE. OUR. OWN. SHIT. Literally. And most of the time, even If I lament my singleness to no end, I do know that, unless the right person comes around, I’m ok-ish with my reality. Because while my reality contains a lot of shit I don’t enjoy, it also means that I have my house and my stuff to myself. Which means I can do what I want most of the time. For example I can go to bed at 8pm, slathered in oils and potions hoping to ward off gravity and age, and awake at 4am to view Center Stage while making stress crafts. Now that I think about it, that could be why I’m single, but still! Imagine trying to do that with some hunk wanting to ravish you and shower you with love all the time? What a fucking buzzkill!! And look, its not a perfect life by any means, but I deal most of the time. Until I don’t. There are two instances that cause me to break the zen-like nature I’ve crafted while being an isolated, spinster. These are times when I well and truly lose my shit and it causes me to scream to the Gods, and curse them to the depths of Hell for never sending me a strapping carpenter, or Middleburry Professor who looks like Secretary-era James Spader. And those times are when I have to shovel snow or when I’m legitimately sick. Those two things break me in ways its hard to verbalize. And up to this point this winter, it’s been very, very heavy on the snow and the curses to the gods for making me shovel. Until now. Now I’ve gotten the double whammy. Insult, meet injury.

I think its actually quite surprising that I don’t get sick more often, to be honest. I’m not what you call a “healthy” person. Up until this year, I slept about 4 hours a night and my main dietary staple was a bottle of wine with a side helping of stress and repressed anger. Sure I boxed, but I don’t think anyone thought it was healthy to punch nonstop for two hours, fueled by rage. What I’m saying is, I’m amazed I’m actually still alive. Not only alive but somehow also with a functional immune system. Science! With that said, the thing that tends to remind me of what a sack of garbage I actually am are my lungs. I had asthma as a kid and into my teens, but it wasn’t debilitating by any means. And irritation, but tolerable. My grandmothers however both had horrible, horrible asthma and I watched in terror from afar, thinking of how awful it was seeing them gasp and wheeze and spend stints in the hospital, thanking god that I would never have to deal with that nightmare. HAHA. Jokes on my ass. A few years ago, my asthma came back with a vengeance. I went from not really worrying about it to sleeping next to a rescue inhaler and trying life hacks to, ya know, breathe. It became awful and exasperated by stress. Which, if there’s anything I’ve had in the past decade is stress. But even with the lung issue, for the most part I’m able to miss out on the cold and flu season. I never get stomach bugs, I’m not sure what my intestines are made of, but i’m pretty sure its that mercury shapeshifting indestructible metal shit that the Terminators foe melted into during T2, because I’m immune to all that nonsense. Sure I’ll get a head cold from time to time, and I’m always suffering from allergies, but an actual flu? Rare. Once every few years. Which is awesome. But I guess that also means when I do get sick, I get sick big. I go for the gold! And go for the gold I apparently did this year.

It started recently with my asthma getting worse at night - and before I knew it I had gone through a brand spanking new rescue inhaler with 200 glorious, lung opening puffs, gone in less than two weeks. That is…not good. At all. I would get winded and need to take a puff after walking from my car into work. I walked around the dining room filling coffee and would be winded so bad that I’d have to take a puff. Then the cough arrived. Now, this is not my first rodeo with a cough that makes people wildly uncomfortable. The last time my asthma got very bad, I was between working for Harvey and my last boss, and had taken an interim position with a billionaire on the Upper East Side of NYC. Like, an actual, real deal very billionaire-y, billionaire. He looked and behaved like Daddy Warbucks, but I actually didn’t mind him so much. I knew his daughter from a former job and wasn’t scared of his whole screamy-schtick. My coworkers however, were terrifying. The woooooorst. I worked in a bullpen with seven SEVEN 7!! other ladies - all assistants doing the same thing for the same man and trying to sabotage the others. It was chaotic, and remarkably, the first time I had been bullied by coworkers in a way that made me loathe going into work. Sometimes I would just sit on the subway and let it take me all the way from Brooklyn to the Bronx, before riding it all the way back, and then having to force myself to get off at the stop that would lead me to the office. As my stress ramped up, so did my asthma, and the cough that came with it. The cough was/is not really comforting to hear. Its like if an elderly woman who had been smoking since the age of nine and worked in a coal-mine since birth, caught tuberculosis. It’s unnerving, and I’m sure it was very annoying to listen to while you were busy trying to plot schemes against coworkers. It really put a damper on their evilness. But, because we worked in close quarters, I was told the sound of my cough was problematic and was sent to our in-house doctor (the perks of being a billionaire). The doctor was also concerned and convinced I had pneumonia and set me up with the best pulmonologist in the city. The appointment was a week later, but before I could go, I ended up in the ER. You know how I mentioned that being single means you have to deal with shit solo? Well in this case it meant I had to fucking uber myself to and from the ER and pharmacy in Brooklyn. There’s nothing like having a party Uber pick you up at 3am on a Saturday night, with house music blasting, as it scurries you to the closest hospital. I seriously considered ducking and rolling out of the car, allowing myself to die on the street, rather than the last thing I heard before being ushered into the underworld being some hideous house music with the smell of busted air fresheners wafting through the Kia Sorento. The upside was that after a few breathing treatments and heavy meds, I was better regulated and it wasn’t more serious. But you know what? No one came to fucking check on me after that. To make sure I was alive. I had to keep myself alive!!! What the fuck, ya know? So, this ain’t my first rodeo with black lung. So, when my asthma kicked up this time, I knew what to expect. Until the cough that I was used to also took on a seal-barking quality that added a level of awful to the sound that even made me shudder. It was bad enough that I chipped a tooth coughing and then barfed from gaging for good measure. Come and get me, boys! * wink * So, I spent two nights fitfully googling “whooping cough” symptoms, and then recording myself and sending videos of the sound of my cough to my wonderful friend Erin so she could give me some advice. And her advice was go to the fucking ER. I laughed it off. I had been down this road before. Everything was going to be fine. Until I coughed so hard that my heart started fluttering and I almost passed out. It was then that I realized, if I did die, who the fuck would find me? Maybe my coworkers if I didn’t show up to work. But honestly, I need to do a deep clean on my house first and I don’t want to die while its messy and have people tromping around through all of my bullshit. I need to clean before my time comes. So, the next day I begrudgingly went to the urgent care. While having a coughing fit in the waiting room, three (3!!) people got up and retrieved complementary masks from the receptionist. It was mortifying. The doctor could hear me outside and fast tracked the process. This time I did have pneumonia. Baby pneumonia. But pneumonia all the same. I was given prednisone, which I hate and antibiotics and told to take it easy.

And this is where I will totally cop to turning into a big ol baby. When I get sick, like sick, sick, and not some trifling cold, that is the moment that all my “eh this is my lot in life, I’m fine with being alone” bullshit goes straight out the window and I scream and curse the gods and wallow in my misery. You know why? It’s not because people won’t help you, its that you’re going to have to ask. And I do not want to ask. Because asking means you work yourself with the whole process - the worrying you’re overstepping, worrying you’re asking too much, worrying you’re asking too little, worrying you’re asking at all. And I loathe that. I loathe having to ask someone, when I already feel like hot garbage, to do me a favor. I want to be sick and have my medicine and some soup and someone to make sure the dogs are fed and ok while I sleep it off. And I don’t have that. I don’t have anyone who is obligated to just be nice to me without me having to ask for it. Without me having to go through my rolodex to figure out who’s schedule might align at the right time to do me a favor and who I can ask and not feel like its going to be “a thing”. But being single means you don’t have that option. And when you’re feeling crummy and low and you just want to fucking sleep, the last thing you want to do is deal with all the logistical and emotional shit that goes with needing help. So, you suck it up and if there’s soup there, then you’re good and if not, if you’re like me, you scrounge around and find top ramen and try not to think about what a pathetic sight you are. An almost 40 year old woman eating top ramen out of a mixing bowl because you don’t have the energy to do dishes, hacking away the best years of your life, while you look outside and realize thanks to the fresh three inches of snow outside you’re going to have to shovel, busted lungs and all, because there’s no one else to fucking do it for you. Yet again. And honestly, isn’t the biggest perk of having a partner being able to have someone to support you in times of need? Like, isn’t the whole point of being in a partnership having that person who will be there through thick and thin and who will help lift you up when you’re in a bad place. And you do the same for them? Goddamn that sounds nice right about now.

And by the way, yesterday morning I did get out and shovel the snow. And guess what? IT SUCKED. If you feel like I’m about to tell you the shoveling in the snow caused an asthma attack and I fell no less than four times, well you are correct. Because I did fall and I did have an asthma attack. And to make it all worse, a neighbor going down the road before me spun out and somehow ended up sideways, wedged between the guardrail and the hill, unable to un-stick himself. None of us could get down the hill (unless you wanted to attempt to walk down the ice, slide over the top of the Subaru like you’re in fucking CHiPs outrunning Ponch and John and then never be able to get home because your lungs won’t allow you to walk up the goddamn hill at the end of the day). So I sat in my car for an hour waiting for the wrecker to arrive, hacking and wheezing, with narrowed eyes - glaring at the snow and beauty and majesty. And in that moment I allowed myself to hate myself for being single and hate myself for moving to Vermont and hate myself for hating myself. The feeling passed, but much like my wheeze, it will be back. Its always there, hiding away, waiting to make an appearance to remind you that it exists. But until then, I’ll keep taking my antibiotics, and inhaler, and God willing, if I’m still here next year, I’ll have someone who will be there to quietly help without me asking. But I’m not holding what little breath I have. At least the thaw is coming, right?