Just know that I do have it.
Ever since my party just over a week ago, I've had this cough. No, backtrack. I completely lost my voice the day after my party, then this cough started to develop. At first, it was a very persistent yet polite cough - polite, in that it was very quiet even though I was constantly coughing. It's like I was a heroine out of an old Victorian novel with consumption. I started to feel like I should've started carrying around a white handkerchief, so that I could politely cough into it. So I blamed the cough on the weather. Stupid East coast, continually attacking my immune system. It was especially attractive when I went out drinking, and spent the whole night coughing and hoping that I wouldn't take a sip of drink and be overcome by another coughing spell and have to spew my drink all over whoever I was talking to (although some of them definitely deserved it).
I thought that going home would cure it. Oh no. Instead, the cough got more violent, and I really wouldn't have been so surprised if I had coughed up a lung. It was horrendous, and seriously unattractive. It would've been better classified as a hacking cough. So I started telling people that I had the plague. It was great fun to watch them edge away slowly. As if I'd share if I really had the plague - no, I'd just infect the unknowing masses.
Then it slowly got better - or so I started to believe. No, somehow the cough developed in such a manner that now I'm generally fine throughout the day, but as soon as the sun sets it's coughcoughcoughcough all over again. And I now know what I have.
I so have croup.
I do NOT care that it is generally limited to children under 6 years of age. As I have often stated, I have the maturity level of a three-year-old (albeit one who is allowed to drink and stay up past midnight). Therefore, it's entirely possible that I have the disease. Please note that one of the symptoms is that the coughing attacks happen at night.
I'm okay with it, really. And nothing is going to sway me from my (definitely incorrect) diagnosis (good thing I left med school, mm?). I did rather enjoy saying I had the plague, though. But this croup is almost just as good.
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