March Madness

It is with surprising regularity that I find myself sick in March, one way or another, and not insignificantly so. One year in college, I didn’t get a flu shot and when I finally came down with it, I was sick for almost the entire month. For the worst week of it, I slept 18-22 hours a day. It didn’t occur to me, except in hindsight, that I probably should have seen a doctor at that point. Of course, I was too busy being unconcious.

Another year, while pregnant with Pixie, I picked up a nasty upper respiratory infection that suddenly became suspiciously like foot-and-mouth disease, which is possible since I was working with kids as young as 5 at the time, and in the close quarters of a germ breeding factory school. My mouth, tongue, and throat were so sore I could hardly eat and lost 10 pounds in 5 days at 7 months pregnant. When the short course of prednisone they finally had to give me cleared it up, I was briefly well long enough to go back to work and pick up strep.

Last year in March, I was at the end of my pregnancy with Chappy and was having difficulty going up and down stairs, walking, breathing, not vomiting, and staying out of the Emergency Room. A difficult month, and there was one period of three or four hours that the doctors were concerned I might drop dead at any moment from a pulmonary embolism that turned out to, thankfully, not exist. Before the end of the month, there was another brief period, en route to the ER with breathing difficulties that were non-responsive to my inhaler, where I wasn’t certain what would happen if I didn’t force myself to stay concious for the next few minutes. I almost fainted in the ER parking lot, and I can tell you that you don’t have to wait for service when you waddle in, 9 months pregnant, and your chest hurts and you can barely breathe.