![]() The bacterium also emits various toxins, some of which mask the infection and don’t allow your immune system to recognize and attack it. pertussis glom onto and paralyze the cilia, the lash-like filaments in your airways that clear it out of mucus, the stuff your body uses to trap and get rid of the infection. Then, a week or two later, the coughing starts. Pertussis, named after the elegantly latinate bacterium Bordetella pertussis, starts the way of any cold or mild flu. When you explain that, no, I am actually recovering from whooping cough, it can make, after that first stunned and quiet “Oh,” for a nice discussion of public health that ends, inevitably, with a profanity-laced rant about “Park Slope parents” not vaccinating their goddamn kids.Īnd sometimes you find yourself, after years of imagining yourself a serious reporter, writing for the public about what it’s like to cough so hard that you pee yourself. Sometimes, you find yourself explaining a sudden paroxysm on a date, and, at first, the guy might think your sense of humor is particularly edgy, with the occasional Victorian flourish. When it lets go, you look up and see your source staring at you with eyes squared by horror, and you, still catching your breath, have to soothe and reassure them that you are, after two Z-packs, no longer contagious. Sometimes, you’re interviewing a source and the whoop gets you. And sometimes, you’ll start coughing so hard in that hallway that sound engineers peek out and flaccidly offer you some useless cough drops. Sometimes, you’re waiting to go on television to comment on world events, and the producers, having seen how hard make-up was because of your constant, violent coughing, keep you in the hallway until the very last minute so that you don’t interrupt the show with your paroxysms. Sometimes, you’re at the kind of nice restaurant you can now afford at 31, when the audacity of saying “Mm-hmm” as you chew ends with your choking-actually choking-on a shred of grilled scallion. It’s funny having the whooping cough at 31 in 2013. “The coughing,” she said cheerfully, “must’ve helped!” I even spent a long weekend on a beach in north Florida, where a friend commented on my now killer abs-odd since, because of my illness, I had not been to the gym at that point for 35 days. Since I came down with pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough, waking up on Saturday, August 31, with what felt like a light fever and a tightness in my chest, I’ve celebrated the Jewish high holidays, covered Washington's response to the crisis in Syria, hosted several out of town friends and a dinner party or two, attended the funeral of a close relative and the wedding celebration of a close friend, given a lighter strain of the whoop to my mother, and, somewhere in there, managed to turn 31, whooping all the while. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing-also a common side effect. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days.
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