This past holiday season while I was home in Virginia with my family, all the perennial favorites were in place: a tree brightly lit, the dining room table loaded with fattening treats, the wine rack sporting a ’96 Cabernet, and me . . . . with whooping cough?!?

My time with my family this year was especially delightful (insert sarcastic snort here) as it was punctuated with relentless coughing and chest pain followed by short, comatose couch naps interrupted by relentless coughing and chest pain followed by . . . . well, you get the picture.

The only good part about being sick during the holiday was that at least Mom and Dad were sympathetic and brought me food and endless bottles of water. Being alone and sick stinks, but I was lucky enough to feel lousy in good company loaded with TLC.

The illness came on during the third week of my last class before the holiday. With eight days remaining in the block, I put on my game face and powered through because, in block scheduling, I can’t afford to miss one day with my students.

But I knew collapse was imminent when I had to use the little white bag so commonly found in seatback pockets on airplanes. And when on the second plane (it takes me three planes to get home) I couldn’t find the little bag, I had to write the flight attendant a note (rather than shouting it out), explaining my dilemma. I have never seen a flight attendant move so fast.

Things finally got so bad after I’d been home for a few days (and hadn’t slept through the night in two weeks) that Mom took me to an emergent care facility where I was quickly shepherded into the “Sick Room” with all the other sickies while everyone else got to sit in the “Well Room.” While the “Well” people all read their magazines cheerily without so much as a sniffle, we sickies huddled around the Kleenex box, heads lolling from side to side in our feverishly confused states.

Later, armed with a stack of prescriptions, I found out that I was about to be introduced to the most wondrous product in the world for whooping coughers such as myself: prescription cough syrup. This was no ordinary cherry-flavored shot of cough suppressant. Oh no. This one made me sleep. And sleep. Twelve hours later, Mom poked her head in my room and asked, “Are you still alive?” My response: “Bed good. World bad.”

Unfortunately for me, though, only my symptoms were being treated at that point. The actual diagnosis of whooping cough wasn’t offered until much later after my chest erupted in explosions of pain all along I-90.

After I returned to Dillon, I almost immediately headed right back out again on a road trip to Thompson Falls. A colleague and I had designed a workshop for high school teachers there, and I left just after noon to give myself plenty of time to reach this remote destination before nightfall.

Three or four coughing fits later, I found myself in the worst, most debilitating pain of my life (later I found out that I most likely tore inter-costal cartilage during one of those coughing spasms). Hugging my chest with my left hand, I steered with my right and hoped for a miracle.

Instead, I found that I was lost, having gone too far north. It was dark, it was snowing, and each shaky breath I took anticipated another coughing fit. The frosting on this cruddy cake was the sign by the road that warned, “Watch for big horn sheep.” Are you kidding me with this, I thought. My chest is exploding, I can only drive with one hand, and now you’re telling me about livestock on the road?

Luckily, I arrived at Thompson Falls safely, put on my game face again, and powered through. The next evening when I arrived back in Dillon, I knew I’d had enough of being sick. My physician here got me on the right medicine, and I took a few days off before the beginning of the block to lay in repose on my couch.

Though I anticipated being solitary in my sickness here in Dillon, I found that I wasn’t alone. A dear colleague brought me a care package of bath salts and peanut M&Ms (which I enjoyed simultaneously). My department chair dropped by to offer words of encouragement and congratulations on a job well done during my first semester here.

And for the first time in a month, I breathed easily in the knowledge that my family had grown.