Day.... 9

I woke up the other day with a mild sore throat and cough.  I took some NyQuil Saturday night, and on Sunday, I felt horrible.  Super tired, lethargic, and just crappy. Then Sunday night I realized why: I'm super-sensitive to NyQuil.  I don't usually take it because for some reason it takes 24 hours to get out of my system. Yesterday I was feeling better with just a bit of post-nasal drip coughing.  Today, the same thing.

Normally, I'd chalk it up to the sinus infection-turned-bronchitis that I normally get this time of year, but all of the COVID-19 talk had me panicking.  I don't know of anyone who has it, but the unknown is the fearful part.

See, I have asthma.  I had it as a child, and I outgrew it.  Then, 5 years ago, after my 5th or 6th bout of bronchitis that landed me in the ER (the last one ended with an ER trip, not all of them), I was sent to a pulmonologist who diagnosed me with asthma - he said that I was misdiagnosed with chronic bronchitis, which just made things worse.  Since then, I've been on a nightly inhaler and a pill, and for the most part it's been manageable.  Maybe twice (always in the spring) I've had to up my dose of the steroid inhaler, but I rarely use my albuterol/rescue inhaler and I've only used my nebulizer three times in the past 5 years.

Deep down, however, my fear is something more than just the unknown and having asthma.  My family has had notoriously bad luck with lungs.  As a child, my sister and my father had really bad cases (this was before the steroid inhalers of today).  It was a dark joke amongst my family: Who would go to the ER this Christmas?  My dad and my sister were always taking turns.  I've had to call 911 when my sister's asthma was terrifyingly bad, and my mom and sister would later joke that they remember me shouting to the paramedics, "Take my sister to Hermann; don't take her to Ben Taubb!"

My sister's asthma improved greatly when she got pregnant; that is a happy "side effect" to pregnancy.  Before the was pregnant, she was afraid to get pregnant because of all of the medications she was on to control her asthma.  Well, almost 9 years later, I have an adorable nephew and she hasn't had to go to the hospital for asthma once.

My father, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky.

One night, when I was 16, my father was struggling to breathe.  We noticed he was using his nebulizer machine more than normal that day (he used it weekly), but we were too busy cleaning the house for a bridal shower we were hosting for my cousin the next day.  Long story short, the nebulizer wasn't working.  He finally let us call 911 (he was a flight nurse for Hermann Hospital Life Flight and REALLY didn't want his coworkers to see him like this). When they got him into the ambulance, he had a heart attack (from the strain of not breathing).  By the time they got him to the hospital, he was in a coma and brain-dead (from lack of oxygen going to his heart and brain).  He never woke up.  He died 3 days later.

8 years ago, my mother's luck ran out as well.

Mom was a lifelong smoker (my dad was a smoker, too, until he was 30 and his doctor said either he quits or he doesn't see his children grow up).  One fall, she started feeling sick.  Her doctor said it was pneumonia.  She didn't get better after several months.  Her doctor sent her somewhere else.  Tests were done.  The verdict: lung cancer.  When they caught it, she had a 10cm tumor in her lung, one in her liver, one in her breast, and 10 in her brain.  After a flurry of radiation treatments to shrink the ones in her brain and one round of chemo, she died.  She never stood a fighting chance.

So my concern with my cough and with COVID stems from watching both parents die of lung issues (although I do know that my mom's was self-inflicted) and my sister struggle.

That's why I am not leaving my house for two weeks, and I wish my husband wouldn't either.  He's pretty good about staying, but he's a smoker (I know - I'm so irritated with him), and he won't buy enough cigarettes to last him two weeks.

Last night, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said that 70-year-olds can take care of themselves, that people need to go back to work despite the contagion.  What a horrifying idea.  If my parents were alive now, I'd quarantine myself with them to protect them.  Because that's what we should do for each other: we should protect each other.