My dear doctor, I am surprised to hear you say that I am coughing very badly, as I have been practicing all night.
"You need to do something about that cough," my ninety-year-old client admonished a few minutes ago, as I hacked my way through my fifth phone conference of the day.
How long has this been going on now? Nearly a month, by my count. I've run the gamut of symptoms of this plague I spread like Typhoid Mary from Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way across the continent and over the Bosphorus into Asia, where poor Jim and Anna are still under the weather for having the temerity to hug my contagious neck. First a sore throat, then a sinus infection followed by laryngitis, and now this constant cough.
I feel fine, really, but can't shake this thing. I hack on the phone. I hack into my dictaphone while creating nasty demand letters. I cough like I'm trying to expel a lung whenever I laugh--watching SNL in bed on the tablet with Peg the other night left the whole boudoir sounding like a TB ward.
For years I've kidded that if I get a hangnail, in two weeks it'll turn into bronchitis. Actually, that would be since 1991. I blame flying back-and-forth through oil well fires and burning chemical weapons plants in Iraq, landing afterwards in a jet covered in a thin slime of oily smoke residue. I've always figured my delicate alveoli were similarly coated, and my respiratory system never quite got over the insult, even as I was running marathons and otherwise keeping myself in reasonable shape.
If past is precedent, I figure I'll spend a few more weeks periodically trying to cough up a lung, propping myself up at night and trying not to wheeze on Zoom calls, then the cough will gradually abate until one day I notice that it's no longer there. In the meantime, poor P is stuck living with Croupie, the asthmatic dwarf, who's used this whole syndrome as an excuse to have an extra cocktail because, after all, it tamps down the old coughing impulse.
Back to it. Today's been an exercise in speed-dating, with me as usual promising clients about twice the work I'm actually able to complete. I need three of me. If you have a bar card and a pulse, and don't mind getting hacked upon by your boss, we have a place for you here.
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