In the Fall of 2009, I contracted H1N1, aka the Swine Flu. Initially well-timed, it spared me an overnight shift at Borders when the employees were mandated to stay and hang up Christmas décor. Downside: it was the flu and, like every illness I had before and since, it left me with a long lingering bout of bronchitis.
For those who don’t know, bronchitis is gross and painful when untreated. An inflammation of the bronchial tubes, it makes it difficult to move air in and out of the lungs. When that air has trouble moving it triggers a severe cough whose constant spasms result in further inflammation of the bronchial tubes (and for me, some long lasting internal scarring). Some people don’t get it very bad, but when I get bronchitis it is almost always severe. When I was thirteen, a Christmastime infection ended in pneumonia. Another infection that began while I was on a Disney World vacation was accompanied by a parallel case of pink eye. My last round with it, in 2018, turned into four months of on and off infections due to my weakened lungs combatting other various respiratory viruses in the air that season. I have spent a lot of my life hacking and barking, coughing up phlegm and the occasional blood droplets.
Typically, I require steroids with other cough suppressants because breathing becomes so labored (though it was all antibiotics when I was younger). I dread flu and cold seasons because it doesn’t take much to trigger the bronchitis. COVID-19 has provoked new paranoias in my already anxious mind.
Back to 2009. It had been a month since I recovered from the flu, but my bronchitis had developed into a robust infection. My health insurance was not great, and I burned my sick days on the flu. So, I was working, and I was coughing.
I spent the first half of every shift stocking shelves. It was fun when I was working in the stock rooms with my friends, but it mostly sucked when moving the merchandise onto the sales floor.
It was during one of those shifts on the sales floor that I was pushing a three-tiered, doubled sided book cart loaded down with travel guides. Sick, and long overdue for a vacation, I was less than thrilled to spend time in the Travel section. Approaching the shelves and suppressing a spasm in my throat, I felt a rumbling in my lungs rise and escape into an acute coughing fit at the same moment I gave the heavy cart a forceful push forward. Something popped.
It took a moment before I felt any pain, and I lingered in curiosity unaware that I was in shock. Something popped. It was on the right side of my body, maybe below my lungs? Under my arm? Something popped. I took a deep breath and immediately collapsed.
Shallow breaths, shallow breaths, I pulled myself up and walked delicately to our employee breakroom, the book cart abandoned in Travel.
In the breakroom was a long couch built into the wall. I couldn’t sit down without pain, and so I propped my stiffened body against the sofa, inching down until I could lay on my left side, left hand holding the pain in place on my right. I did not move.
After some time and a series of important internal questions (am I dying? AM I dying? Am I DYING???), my head manager wandered into the room to retrieve something from a nearby refrigerator.
She paused and looked over my obviously dying body and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” It is merely a question, not a hint of concern, but with a bit of annoyance.
I described, between halting breaths, what just happened and how I couldn’t move or breathe without agonizing pain.
“Hmm,” she began with even less concern, “I think you had a pulmonary embolism. I had one once when I was walking in a parking lot. I almost died. You’re probably going to die.” And on that unimpassioned note, she turned and left the room.
I started coughing and the pain hit like a hammer on the spot where I felt the pop. I held my breath and slowly inhaled again, and then did this for another half hour, assuming I might die in the breakroom of a Borders.
My boss eventually popped back in to remind me that I was being paid for my time and I needed to decide if I was staying or going home. In that half hour the pain became neither worse, nor better, and I didn’t die. I was also pretty broke (the holidays were upon us, after all). So, I pulled myself upward with strained muscles and inched my way back to the sales floor.
I didn’t go back to restocking, but I didn’t go home either. I continued to work, coughing, and hurting, and not breathing so good. This was pure retail. As long as I was conscious I could work.
It would be a few more days before I was diagnosed with a fractured rib. It would hurt for several weeks since I could only treat the cough and I still had to perform a very physical job. Over a decade later I can still occasionally feel a lingering ache in my rib cage, just below my right lung.
What if it had been something worse? What if it was more than just a fracture? The co-workers that I considered friends were not around and the one person who found me was unempathetic. Wouldn’t my manager have to fill out significant paperwork if one of her staff died on the job? Shouldn’t that have been enough to care just a little?
I do know this for sure: if I had died in that breakroom, I would have unquestionably haunted the crap outta that store until the day they went bankrupt (and then for a little while longer after the store’s empty husk was converted into a Spirit Halloween the following Fall).
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