The Thanksgiving Plague

Some years ago, it was November, and my mother and I planned to go to my aunt's for Thanksgiving. It was just the two of us, so it didn't make sense to make a big dinner at home.

As the holiday approached, however, things changed. Mom came down with sort of cold or flu, and was miserable. She coughed, she hacked, she blew her nose. She stayed in bed, and wasn't interested in doing much of anything, even eating. At one point, she decided she was going to get up and go into the living room. She stayed out there for about an hour, then went "I'm going back to bed." I also commented that we probably didn't need the central heat on, because Mom was radiating plenty of heat.

A gamer's depiction of how high the fever was.

Thanksgiving rolled around, and Mom braved sitting in the living room for more than an hour. And then kept falling asleep on the couch. She had been up half the night coughing, so she was tired. I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, some of the dog show that came on afterwards, and 'The House With the Clock in Its Walls'. Mom complained that she kept drifting off during the shows she wanted to watch.

We weren't the only ones to change our Thanksgiving plans, either. One cousin didn't attend because her youngest kid was running a fever. Another cousin was going to have dinner with her boyfriend's parents, but went to my aunt's instead because his mother was sick.

The following day, I started coming down with it. I spent the day coughing, and began a serious relationship with a bag of Halls cough drops. I was like a Katy Perry song. I would be hot, and then cold, and then part of me would be hot and part of me cold... Mom kept making me take Tylenol while I lay in bed like a victim of some Oregon Trail disease.

 

My aunt came over with Thanksgiving leftovers, which we listlessly ate. It's important to keep your strength up when you're sick, but we had no appetites. We were also so congested that we couldn't smell or taste much.

Mom and I continued coughing until we felt we'd hack up a lung, and I spent some of my time lying in bed wishing my body could decide on a temperature. At some point I gave up and just sweltered under the covers. Mom forced more Tylenol down my throat, and I continued my diet of mentho-lyptus while coughing so much I gagged.

Some time during the miserable illness, I decided to take a shower. The hot water felt so nice on my body. Apparently I spent too long standing there, though, because towards the end of my shower, I started to feel light-headed. I had to sit down for a few minutes to recover before getting dressed.

 

Eventually Mom and I got over the horrible illness, though we had a lingering cough that lasted for months. Months. At one point, I was telling a doctor about it (probably explaining why I was coughing so much), and she said, "Yeah, the flu strain was really bad this year. A lot of people were hospitalized."

Interestingly enough, a few months later, people started talking about this thing called COVID. And then everything shut down in March. Seems like suspicious coincidence, no?