I’ve been sick since the day after Christmas.  It started as a cold, then laryngitis, then bronchitis and pre-pneumonia.   Then a lingering cough with episodes of severe coughing attacks.  After two months I made an appointment with a pulmonologist.  Handing her my huge envelope of X-rays, I described my cough and how long it had lasted.  “It will last 100 days” she responded.  “You have pertussis, whooping cough. It’s also known as the one hundred day cough because it lasts that long.”

I thought that whooping cough was a disease of the past.  The Fossil sisters in Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild had it, but that book was written in the 1930s, and the sisters likely had not been vaccinated.  I had all my shots as an infant, but the doctor went on to explain that you need booster shots as an adult, and there is now a combined tetanus and pertussis vaccine to ensure that adults get the booster shot whenever they get a tetanus shot.

When the Fossil sisters had whooping cough, Streatfeild wrote, “Whooping cough is a miserable disease, but if you must have it, the worst place is the Cromwell Road; it is so far from the parks and anyplace where you can whoop nicely in private.”  She was wrong.  The worst place is working in an office cubicle, or coughing in meetings in conference rooms, or on buses.  And the Fossil sisters ended up going to a cottage in Kent where “directly they got there they began to whoop less,” and then “went back to London without a whoop in them.”   I had hopes that the doctor would recommend some similar treatment, perhaps a long convalescence by the sea, but instead I was instructed in the use of an inhaler and scheduled for a lung function test.

Today is day 95 so in five days I should be well, unless the 100 days is just a rounded estimate.