Reply #123: I was scheduled to fly from Portland to Minneapolis for Christmas 1999

[Lydia Leftcoast]

The planned schedule was to sing at my church's midnight Christmas Eve service and fly out of PDX at 7:00AM on Christmas Day.

On December 23, I was finishing up the last of my translation work when I started to feel feverish and weak and achy and all the rest. I was hot and thirsty and woozy, all within about three hours. I took my temperature, and it was 102°.

Hoping that this was a 24-hour bug, I crawled into bed and went to sleep, although I woke up coughing several times during the night. By morning I was no better, completely incapable of much but lying around and drifting in and out of sleep. Somehow I managed to get out of bed, fix myself a tall glass of sugared tea, and phone the choir director, my family in Minneapolis, and the airline, but that effort exhausted me, and I went back to bed.

I spent Christmas Eve till noon Christmas Day in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally taking a sip of the tea, and listening to the radio, which I had tuned to the classical station that I volunteered for. I soon realized that the station was playing different arrangements of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" every hour on the hour.

But Christmas morning brought a new complication, a severe cough, so severe that I was afraid I had developed pneumonia. Calling upon the unofficial single women's mutual aid society in the building, I phoned my neighbor and asked if she could drive me to Kaiser-Permanente's urgent care clinic.

The good news was that I didn't have pneumonia. The bad news was that I had "what's going around" and that I was probably due for another day of misery.

The predictions were correct. By around noon on the 26th, my fever broke, and I felt good enough and hungry enough to eat some rice cereal. Improvement was steady and rapid, so I decided to reschedule my flight for late on the 27th.

I continued coughing for my whole stay in Minnesota, which wasn't helped by the fact that my mother and stepfather kept their house dry and 78°. I didn't stop coughing until I returned to warmer, moister Portland and slept one night with the windows open.