Le rhume

The first time I came down with a bad cold alone abroad, it just had to be during midterm week (month).

Ever since I was little, colds have kept me company through every spring and every autumn, never once skipping a year. Of them all, the pneumonia I caught during midterms in my first year of high school left an impression of gray; the laryngitis I got while studying French in Shanghai felt like cold; the tonsillitis during last year’s midterms made me break down in the middle of my homework; and this time, the unidentified upper respiratory infection here in Canada, a COVID hot zone, has left me panicked and a little desperate (why is it midterms again?).

In elementary school, I could never tell whether a cold was a curse or a blessing. On the one hand, I felt miserable; on the other, I didn’t have to go to school—I could burrow under the covers at home and sleep like a log, and while Mom and Dad were out, I could even log on to the online game Seer. Even when I was really sick, it didn’t faze me much: after all, I probably ran through the whole hospital routine several times a year. A scene like that couldn’t scare me. Besides, if the sky fell, Mom and Dad would be there to hold it up! And when I had a cold, my parents waited on me hand and foot, which was a treat in its own right.

A few years older, in middle school, catching a cold felt like being sent back to elementary school: my parents treated me like a grade-schooler, as if being sick had instantly knocked points off my IQ.

The fall semester of my first year of high school—autumn 2016, that is—is etched in my memory not in the deep brown of the plane trees or the bright yellow of the ginkgoes on the Jinling High School campus, and still less in the dashing red of the Jinling girls’ uniforms (?), but in the gray of the sky in that unusually cold, gloomy early winter of November.

The sudden pneumonia, the cold wind across the plaza of Drum Tower Hospital, Dream of the Red Chamber in the IV room, a zero on my Chinese exam, Han Yujie’s mocking, cruel words, an English midterm with a zero for the entire second half, Li Yue’s verdict that “Student xxx has serious problems with his studies,” my parents arguing over whether I should sit the midterms at all… Whenever I think back on those weeks as an invalid in the fall of my first year, these fragments of memory lash at my face and my heart like a merciless blizzard. (Wait, aren’t I supposed to love blizzards?) As I lay in my sickbed coughing violently, the damp, cold, sullen air heralded by the overcast sky outside the window seemed to have soaked into the room, until I could hardly breathe. The pale winter sun, when it occasionally showed its face, only set off the icy atmosphere indoors. At the thought that the midterms might count toward class placement, I caught a dim glimpse of my fate a year down the line, already all but sealed. At a time like this, not even a wish made under the ginkgo tree could save me. Maybe… this was simply my fate. It was the first time I ever felt despair.

But life goes on: catching up on the notes from Li Yue’s class, picking politics back up—a subject whose homework I had never once done… Even though for the next two weeks I spent several hours a day on an IV drip at Drum Tower Hospital, I was still swept along by Jinling High School’s “intense academic atmosphere.” (Thanks for the notes, Brother Zhi.) To this day I clearly remember the bitter laugh inside me when, after the finals, zzh asked how I had managed to climb more than 400 places.

Although this is a piece about my history of getting sick, if it weren’t for that high-pressure, cutthroat, slightly twisted environment, illness would never have churned up my emotions so violently—I might never have gotten sick at all. So forgive me for saying a few things about grades:

In every midterm and final after that, I crashed and burned, crashed and burned, then crashed and burned again. The day the class placements came out, I looked at my rank—273rd in the grade—and almost shouted with excitement: I’m in the top 300! Brother Zhi and our class monitor sincerely congratulated me; it was probably the happiest day of my entire first year. (How pathetic is that.) Maybe Mr. Dai Jianliang put in a word with the Student Affairs Office, and that’s why my zero in Chinese didn’t count toward my score. My 59 in English, though, very much did count—another of my more painful memories. I once wrote a long piece about my first year of high school, and the above is adapted from what I remember of it, but I’ve gone and lost that piece… so I won’t be posting it.

I also caught two more colds that fall semester. The first was around mid-September—I suddenly went down with it, but that time it wasn’t serious, and I was better in two or three days. I even had the good fortune of seeing Mr. Dai Jianliang’s caring side.

The other was during winter break, while I was taking chemistry olympiad classes, and it hit me hard. When I think of that cold now, the keywords that pop up are: coughing like crazy, azithromycin, the “Study Patriarch,” Piano Tiles 2 (“The Doll and the Little Bear Dance”), the Lewis (?) structure of sulfuric acid.

I got sick once more in the spring semester of my first year, which left me feeling pretty down.

Next comes the laryngitis in Shanghai. It was a February day in Shanghai, with the classic cold rain the Jiangnan region gets in February and March: drizzling every single moment, the temperature hovering somewhere between freezing and ten degrees Celsius. Sitting in the library, I put down my French book and quickly assessed my situation: self-estimated temperature, 38°C; dizziness; severe sore throat. What to do? Better go to the hospital. After dinner, I looked up a top-tier hospital in Shanghai on my phone—as far as I can remember, Xinhua Hospital, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, about four or five subway stops from Shanghai International Studies University. By then it was already dark, the wind biting, the cold rain drifting down. I scanned a shared bike and, umbrella in one hand and the other gripping the icy handlebar, rode toward the subway station shivering all over. With a speed buff, the bleak wind and rain completely ignored my umbrella and went straight for my face—not to mention the hand on the handlebar, which had long since “frozen stiff.” I had to see the road, so I couldn’t exactly hold the umbrella in front of my face, could I? So what then? No way around it, that’s just how it had to be: I’d switch hands every so often. By the time I reached the subway station, my down jacket was soaked through. (Believe it or not, that very down jacket is hanging by the door to my left as I write.) At the hospital, they took my temperature: 39.1°C! Holy cow. Next, naturally, came the traditional ER blood test—this part I knew by heart. Diagnosis: laryngitis. At that point, everything seemed to indicate this was just the most ordinary of bad colds. On the way back, I couldn’t keep my hands off my phone (okay, maybe that wasn’t so dumb) and Baidu’d “laryngitis,” learning that it can cause swelling of the airway and, in severe cases, difficulty breathing or even suffocation. Thanks to this reminder from Baidu Baike, I successfully discovered that my breathing really was a bit off—there was a distinct feeling of something stuck when I breathed, and the air wasn’t going through very smoothly. Now my mind went completely blank. What if I suffocated? A seventeen-year-old far from home—surely I wasn’t about to kick the bucket just like that? On the subway in the Magic City, every second seemed to drag on forever. I looked at the Shanghai locals around me and thought: right now I’m on the subway; if I suffocate, with this many people around, somebody will probably call an ambulance—maybe I’ll be fine. But the night is long—who knows if something will happen while I’m asleep?… Hmm… go back to the hospital? Nah, let’s not… In that instant, on the packed Shanghai Metro Line 8, I felt an indescribable loneliness. It truly was a feeling beyond words… Maybe it was helplessness, maybe regret—regret at my own weakness and uselessness, hating myself for not even wanting to go back to the hospital, so lazy; but more than anything, maybe, I was thinking of how happy I used to be when I was sick and had Mom and Dad to look after me: a little home full of people who cared about me, whereas the passengers in this car were all strangers “fated” to cross my path and nothing more. At that thought, I decided my life was in my own hands, so I resolutely got off, rode back the other way, returned to the hospital, and told the doctor my worries. The doctor took another look at my throat and, half exasperated and half amused, told me off for diagnosing myself on Baidu, then sent me on my way.

Was that the end of it? My sore throat was getting worse, and the high fever wouldn’t break. Back at the dorm, I took a fever reducer and got ready for bed. But one thought kept nagging at me—what if I suffocated in my sleep? Lying in bed, whether it was psychological or the illness really getting worse, I felt my breathing grow rapid; my windpipe really did seem to have narrowed, and I had to work harder to breathe. It was a cold experience like nothing before, completely unknown. Gradually I realized things were beyond my control, and this feeling was nothing my own experience could explain. Is this what difficulty breathing feels like? Am I going to… die… Die. It was the first time in my life I had ever thought about that question. I imagined my roommates’ horror when they got up the next morning to find a corpse in my bunk, imagined my parents falling apart at the news, imagined the sounds I would make suffocating in my sleep… I couldn’t let myself think about it anymore. I shifted my position, trying to make breathing a little easier. Maybe I should go back to the hospital. Yeah, if it gets any worse, I’ll go back right away… No, wait. The Shanghai Metro doesn’t run in the small hours, does it? So I’d take a cab? (I don’t think there were ride-hailing apps yet back then?) No good—where would I find a cab at that hour? Call an ambulance? But that would be way too embarrassing—what if it turned out to be nothing? No, no, no: better safe than sorry—I’d still have to call the ambulance. That’s what I was thinking. Suddenly it occurred to me that my night-owl roommates might be able to save me, so I told them: “Guys, if you see me struggling to breathe tonight, you’ve got to call an ambulance, okay? I’m afraid I’ll go to sleep and never wake up. (Not necessarily my exact words.)” My roommates stared at me in surprise and promised up and down. But I still couldn’t set my mind at ease. In the end, there in utter dread, worrying and worrying, I fell asleep—probably no match for the physical and mental exhaustion of the day. When I woke up the next day, I still had a fever, but my sore throat was much better; it truly felt like I had survived a heavenly tribulation. Azithromycin really is a miracle drug. Don’t tell me it was mycoplasma again (that’s what the pneumonia was last time)?

I’m out of time, so I’m off to bed. This time I’ll stop at my laryngitis in Shanghai.

Someday I’ll write about my miserable experience during this midterm week, COVID edition. But I have another homework deadline coming right up, so I probably won’t have time. Roughly speaking: it was worse than that laryngitis—my whole windpipe was in agony, I had trouble breathing, and then I couldn’t sleep all night, terrified it was acute epiglottitis or COVID or something like that. On a normal week that might have been fine, but it was midterm week, and I had an elective I hadn’t reviewed (or rather, previewed). I felt like I was about to be wiped out of existence—not only scared of dying, but scared that if I didn’t die, the midterms would kill me (What emotions does the author express here? What social phenomenon does he criticize? 5 points). And then there was that feeling of being a lonely stranger in a strange land, doubly depressed at every cold. Mostly, of course, I missed my family and friends… but enough of that for now. What left me rather speechless was that the next morning, after an involuntary all-nighter, I took a single Baijiahei day-and-night cold tablet and immediately felt cured—every symptom gone. So cold medicine really does work. I never used to take it, and I was wrong. This one made a deep enough impression, though, that I’m sure I’ll still be able to write it up years from now. Sorry for the anticlimax—tiger’s head, snake’s tail. But I think it’s perfectly normal for college students these days not to have time to keep a diary!

N.B. (misused) Written in a rush, in two sittings several days apart. Apologies for any clumsy phrasing, ungrammatical sentences, and so on.

P.S. I’m more or less recovered now and made it through midterm week safe and sound, apart from a lingering dry cough. But I missed some classes, which has put me on the back foot for a while. I hope everyone stays healthy. Your body is the capital of the revolution, comrades. Be sure to live well, exercise properly, stay up late less, cut down on snacks and junk food, and drink more hot water.