Day One: Something is stirring in New York City. A chill spring wind is picking up, littering sidewalks with cherry-blossom petals. And a new pain is forming at the back of your head, disarmingly close to your parietal lobe (you discover after Googling “brain areas labelled”).
Day Two: This mysterious pain is progressing, and quickly. Your husband calls out to you from the kitchen that there’s a more colloquial term for an ache in your head, but you tune him out to focus on the A.I. summary search result for “What does the parietal lobe do?” You learn that it’s “crucial for processing sensory information,” which sounds like a vital skill for a brain to have.
Day Three: You wake up to a feeling of dread and decide on a brisk morning walk to take in the restorative Brooklyn air, much as a tubercular Romantic poet would have retreated to the seaside. You see, on your walk, that the trees lining the streets are fast turning green, which is cheering. The sight of new life doesn’t fix your sore head, however. Instead, you return home with a cough.
Day Four: The cough is worsening, particularly on your walks, forcing you to stay inside your cramped “study” (or, as the realtor for your fourth-floor walkup apartment pitched it, “think of this as a half room”). Your husband asks if your throat is still “tickling,” which makes you scoff—“tickling” being an inadequate word for the turmoil in your trachea. This triggers another coughing attack.
Day Five: You are now experiencing flashes of pain every time you blink, contemptuously, at your husband. Opening all the windows (necessary, given that the hottest boiler in all of Brooklyn is still turned on in your building) only aggravates your cough. Being relegated to your sickbed leaves you no other choice; you upgrade to Victorian accounts of suffering. You start passive-aggressively rereading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and aggressive-aggressively reminding your husband that it’s a crime against feminism that he hasn’t read it yet.
Day Six: In what you assume is a sign of your body’s imminent total collapse, your eyes are now itching and watering. What condition could so swiftly wear down your most basic abilities—thinking, breathing, seeing? You consider how, at last year’s vision checkup, you turned down the optometrist’s offer to use a hundred-thousand-dollar machine to take photos of the back of your eye, because it would have cost you an extra seventy dollars. Pointlessly, you wonder whether they would have caught the eye cancer/brain tumor/stroke that is causing your current demise.
Day Seven: You think back wistfully to the start of this week, when your condition was confined to a mere ache in the sensory-processing lobe of your brain, and curse yourself for underreacting to the onset of this sickness. You fumble, weakly, for the pulse oximeter in your nightstand, which you bought when you had pneumonia three years ago, and had to keep going back to urgent care for a daily chest X-ray, until you were told that there’s a limit to how many “medically unnecessary” scans your insurance will cover (the limit is zero). Your hand seizes on a pink oblong pill, fexofenadine—and what a relief to find it there, a reminder of your regular April allergy flareups! After all, you surely wouldn’t want your eyes to be red or your nose to be runny when your nearest and dearest see you in your open casket.
You go to set a calendar reminder for this time next year that says, “REMEMBER YOU HAVE ALLERGIES,” then stop yourself. You don’t want to make this any harder on your soon to be widowed husband than it already will be. You picture him, sitting alone in your former not-legally-a-room room, in the throes of mourning, most likely questioning why he never took his late wife to Rome for the rest cure she so frequently suggested. You delete the event from your phone and sigh, contemplating a life lesson learned too late. Nevertheless, you’re glad you took the fexofenadine while you still were able. You’re already feeling better for it. ♦
