Fever Dreams

Last week, I had a horrible cold that make my asthma flare up and bronchioles go all aflutter.

I treated it with a mixture of everything we had in the medicine cabinet. However, those were mostly second string treatments. The only rescue inhaler I had was the OTC Primatene Mist stuff. Any asthmatic unfamiliar this relic is lucky. The active ingredient is adrenaline, one of the earliest and first improved upon asthma treatments. It jumps starts your lungs by inducing a smaller version of the "fight or flight" response in your brain. To the uninitiated, imagine trying to cure your cold with an IV of Red Bull and you could get the picture. After repeated uses, the stuff stops to work, but I actually kept taking it for a slight tiny jonesing for the Styrofoam taste of it. Also, it comes in a bulbous container colored the same buff yellow of a whitehead pimple. Seems like an odd design for something that is pure adrenaline. They need to make this bad boy sexy and fierce looking. Maybe a lightning bolt or a racing stripe! It will kick that crap out of your asthma...for 10 minutes! And then it will move on to your throat!

Also, my Vicks Vapor Rub had expired. I had no idea that stuff could expire and that little date etched into the side was not fibbing. The stuff didn't work! I lather my chest and throat in the slime and felt no soothing vapors. I was just slimy. I might as well have tried to slip into a wet suit or slide down an air duct for all the grease that was on me.

The first night of the cold, I slept in intermittent periods of 15 minutes. As the night progressed at the same pace of a hockey game, I had a continuing dream where I was in prison. Not a regular prison, but a single dark room. The plaster on the walls was colored yellow, but that color had to come through black and brown smears. There was a chair. It was spindly, with metal legs and a puffy vinyl cushion with the seams coming apart. The only light came from a small barred window high up off the floor where the wall and ceiling met.

In the dream, I had the feeling I had done something horrible. I never figured out why I was trapped, but it was a heinous crime for sure. The only hint was a nagging feeling that many people had died, but it had all been an accident. An accident I caused.

I spent the night coming in and out of the dream. The room in the dream reciprocated well with our own sparse bedroom. A few times, I awoke and thought that I was still trapped. Except this time it was in China and the nagging guilt only felt stronger because everything in this room (i.e. the bedroom) was palpable and tangible.

After that evening, I spent the day feeling a bit better, but by the evening I had relapsed. We ended up going to the urgent care and getting an asthma treatment and some prescriptions. I also learned that I had the early stages of an upper respiratory infection and ended up on antibiotics. All better now, however. And you got a blog post out of it!

Peace!