I got really sick this month, with some non-COVID virus. I was the only one in the family to come down with it, and I am out in the world a lot less than the rest of them, so it felt like a targeted bolt from the gods. It felled me, with a sore throat so bad I could not sleep for three days and nights. Even on cough medicine, or on some long leftover hydrocodone from an overprescribed dental procedure, I would feel myself pushed down into narcotic sleep, but then the moment I swallowed my own spit, the pain grabbed me by the throat and dragged me back up to the surface. I could feel every rise and crevice in my pharynx, my palette, the bright, inflamed crypts where my tonsils sat snug as corks. It felt like a hot rusty rake had dragged the length of everything from molars on back. A prompt in my meditation timer told me to “practice like I’d swallowed a red hot iron ball.” Easy, under the circumstances. I could hardly think of anything but my brutalized throat, exquisitely embossed in pain. All I did for two straight days was lie on the couch, awake, shifting from one side to the other, to let one hemisection of my snout and sinuses drain into the other, for the novelty of breathing through a new nostril every couple hours.
I tell you all this with trepidation, thinking of my husband’s college roommate, who had a deep and animated aversion to commercials for cold medicine. He hated seeing actors portraying sick people—the puffy eyes, the red noses, the glottal speech and clutched tissues. It drove him crazy. “I know what being sick is like!” he’d yelp at the TV, “I don’t need to look at all this and listen to the coughing and sneezing! Show me healthy people—that’s what you’re selling me, right?” Maybe he was a malcontent in general though, because he decided, after one year, to give up his full scholarship to UMass and transfer to Dartmouth. In any case, I hope you all will indulge my excesses in explaining in exactly what ways I was sick.
I vowed I would never take easeful, painless swallowing for granted again, once restored to health. I thought about Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Butter Print,” especially the lines after he coughs up the awn of rye lodged in his throat:
My breathing came dawn-cold, so clear and sudden I might have been inhaling airs from heaven Where healed and martyred Agatha stares down At the relic knife as I stared at the awn.
I watched an old BBC clip from 1972, of Heaney visiting an island in Lough Erne. He’s dressed in muck boots and an inappropriate, thin leather jacket, as he wanders an old churchyard and mossy scrub. There are carved pagan stones there, two-faced figures, with roofless brain pans that fill with rain. Heaney crouches by one, dips his fingers into the little pool, and waggles them around. I thought about pithing as a way of killing animals that are reluctant to die—inserting a metal rod up the brain stem and scrambling the contents, when there’s no other way to be certain an animal’s suffering is over, if they’re really dead. Turtles need this technique sometimes. The border between dead and alive in those ancients is a wide no man’s land, and they can spend days wandering within it, if you let them.
I thought also about trephination, which I learned about in vet school. We learned landmarks to find where you could drill a hole into a horse’s skull to let its sinuses drain direct to the outside world. It turns out that this sort of thing used to be done to people too, except right over the brain itself. They did this even many thousands of years ago, sometimes to relieve pressure after a head injury, sometimes to let out evil spirits and demons. The hole in the skull would remain open as long as the person survived, with the skin healing over it, making, in an adult, a soft spot like a newborn’s that everyone would need to be careful of.
It took me weeks to get better, and I’m still not fully recovered. Some nidus of pain and inspissated material jolts behind my left tonsil every time I swallow or cough. But there was an unexpected sequel to the whole thing: before I got sick, I’d started learning Irish online. It’s a pointless project in a lot of ways. I won’t ever have cause to speak this language, and it does not occur anywhere in my day to day life. It’s nothing like any other language I know or have studied. The sounds were difficult to produce.
For four days, I didn’t do my lessons, instead lying on the couch, dazed, watching hours of HGTV. The mucus-making goblet cells in my head had been launching their gouts of snot day and night, and everything in my mouth, ear canals, and nose felt thick, congealed. Swallowing was so painful that I hesitated each time, a bolus of spit or water or food teetering at the back of my mouth for a few panicked moments before I could brace myself and go through with it. In this state, I learned the contours of my mouth exactly, and it all felt close, compressed, gluey.
When I was well enough to resume my Irish studies, there was a new ease in it. The sounds I’d tried to make before now came out closer to right. A back of throat sound I had been making in a German way, high, vaulted, I could now make in the Irish way, half-swallowed. A sound I’d borrowed from sun-lit Italian moved back instead, to be buried in deeper darkness. It was a hard-won increment of progress, in this useless work of unearthing a tongue that died out of my lineage who knows how many generations ago. My level of understanding is a child’s; I can tell you that a black cat is sitting under a white moon, or tell you that yes, these are both my sisters, and that the man is wearing a suit but not a tie. I can operate only in the present tense.
The carved figures Heaney crouched beside were two-faced because they could see into the past and into the future. Carved in between the two was the little rain bowl, like a holy water font. Maybe that’s why he reflexively dipped his fingers in. Rewinding and watching it again, I half expected him to make the sign of the cross with the murky, algaed brains of the old gods.
Beautifully written, as always. Having had a wretched sore throat as part of COVID, I experienced anew the fear of swallowing thanks to your description. It was exquisite pain. I hope you will soon be rid of the pestilence.
So descriptive of the dreaded sore throat. I remember as a kid spitting into tissues rather than swallowing.
Hope you are back amongst the healthy.