I click the status box on Facebook and it asks me that question. I look forward to learning what is on my friends’ minds as part of keeping in touch with friends across the world, some of whom I have only met electronically. I want to know what they are doing, what events are happening in their lives, indeed, what’s on their mind. But in the past year I have seen a rapid decline in the number of posts that give me any information about the poster. Instead my wall is filled with cartoons, pictures, videos, and commentary that was shared from someone else’s wall and was probably not original to that wall either. Often I see the same cartoons multiple times. Sometimes I see hoaxes that have been circulating for years. And the worst are shared items that attempt to guilt me into liking or sharing, because if I scroll it means that I don’t like my mother, or God, that I don’t support our military, that I am a bonafide schmuck.

From these posts I learn about the causes my friends support, but I don’t learn anything about them. No longer do I know what’s going on in their lives, what’s on their mind. And I miss that.

Sharing has become effortless; I can even share others’ content from my iPad or iPhone, and I have shared myself when a cartoon or link captures exactly what was on my mind.

In an episode of Bones, Dr. Brennan meets her second cousin Margaret (played by her real-life sister) who carries around a small volume of Benjamin Franklin’s sayings and responds to every question with an aptly chosen saying. At first, Dr. Brennan challenges whether Ben Franklin is the smartest man in the world as her cousin believes, or questions whether the sayings are true, but finally she responds with “I’d rather hear what you have to say than Benjamin Franklin,” and Margaret tells her that that is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to her. I’d rather hear what my friends have to say than something they discovered and passed on. Like Facebook, I want to know what’s on their mind.

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.