bronchitis, I think

25 Jul, 2025

last modified 4 weeks, 2 days ago

originally written on June 21, 2025. fictionalized a little for anonymity.

Lately I've been sick. It's winter where I live, somewhere south of the equator. Here, the tail-end of june through some obscure point in july are a parade of weather-report numbers e.g.: 13 degrees celsius, 10 degrees celsius, 8 degrees celsius, 14 degrees celsius and so on forth.

I'm not very sure what my medical history is myself, to be honest with you. I wasn't told and if I was, I don't remember it. but at some point in my childhood, I caught some kind of pulmonary disease. It was the sort that likes reappearing, or maybe just the sort that makes your lungs worse, and easier to inhabit for other illnesses later down the line¹. I remember, as a kid, spending the weeks around the winter solstice in bed, coughing, with different sorts of nebulizing and vaporizing medical devices at my mom's hand. there's one memory I can almost catch with my hands every time: my parents had old, fancy furniture in their bedroom, these nightstands with marble surfaces, and I'm tucked into their bed, too tired to think about it, but touching the cold stone and watching it reflect the lamps' golden light. I think in this memory, my mom is just outside the room... but she could be just as easily barely out of sight, trying to coax me into some rubbery breather-type apparatus that dispenses medicine.

it's one of many memories I have but don't know if they really happened. My mind is famously unreliable. I remember things that didn't happen, and forget things that did. Combined with my pathological inability to hear about stuff, it means I essentially never know things. For some reason, I simultaneously still think empirical truth is important. Empirical as in, "experienced"; often, if not always, by me. I never remember things that I've been told did happen, and I never forget things proven false. sometimes I decide internally that I'm just being accidentally gaslit, that it did happen, or didn't, and the forgetful one is the other person. I'm not happy never knowing. there's no real "but" at the end of that sentence, I don't think I need to explain why I don't push the issue: sometimes people are wrong and my pointing it out would do more harm than good. I hated those damn nebulizers so much, every single time, I really did; I would describe them to this day as "like micro-dosing waterboarding", which in a literal sense, they were.

I'm generally a really healthy person otherwise, I just have breathing problems. I don't have asthma. in fact, I shouldn't have breathing problems of any kind. I would self-describe as a life-long mouthbreather, but I don't have any sort of deviated septum or anything obvious like that. if there's a reason for me to struggle with breathing at a greater than resting pace throughout most of the year, then it's unknown to me or any doctors I've met with. I can pinpoint with some accuracy the temperature range where it all starts to go wrong, I would describe it as anywhere south of, dunno, 18 degrees celsius, maybe 17. it's not just breathing that starts to hurt, but my hands as well, likely a product of just plum old poor circulation; but it's hard to exercise and fix the latter problem when I can't run without opening my mouth.

I had an argument pretty recently with my mom. not a big one, just one of those things where your mom, who you love 99.9% of the time, says something that makes you acutely aware of the gap in power between the two of you. the way it's like to live as a financial dependant on a responsible adult or guardian is full of little moments like these, because the social ownership someone has of you is, I think, an active enemy for a loving relationship. if I was dramatic I would compare it to feudal serfdom, and I am, so I do. the argument (well, the non-argument) was over my breathing problems: I was old enough by now and conscious enough of myself to object when she said I should go to a homeopathy expert. I love my mom; I think almost everyone lapses into pseudoscience; I want to check people so badly when they do, and so I try to do it when I can. She didn't like this. I'm sure most people on this website will agree that I was right in the argument, and yet this didn't make my mom any less frantic and upset at the idea of being wrong, when I told her that she could easily find scientific papers proving homeopathy was bull.

I dropped it, but her final words have stuck with me: she said "well, then you should schedule an appointment with an otolaryngologist." I don't really know any in my area; I'm sure I could find one if I look. I don't know how to check if they take my family's health insurance; I figure there's instructions out there somewhere in the web, or I could simply call and ask. But my mom would have to sign off on the appointment at the end, because she's the one actually paying for the insurance. I have no income of my own, and very little money to call mine. it's nice to be financially supported, since I don't have to worry about working a job while also juggling other complications, but there's also embarrassing parts to it, like those.

for a really long time, I didn't get sick with anything in my lungs again. years and years. I think since I started highschool, maybe. My primary school was (I distinctly remember this and refuse to be told otherwise) cold as fucking balls, constantly, and it had an uniform that didn't help much; my secondary school was public and I remember it being warm, with the students allowed to stay inside during breaks. I was allowed to wear pants in winter, and bring thick parkas without worrying about being dress-coded. the years might've also just been warmer overall; I wasn't keeping track. I was part of the graduating class of 2020. I spent years afterwards at home.

I've seen a person experience reocurring medical issues. Nothing life-threatening. They're all of the sort that fucks you over financially, because it's a specialized area that a GP knows jack about, but everyone else considers ridiculous to experience, particularly as an adult. as an outside observer, I would describe this person's experience as a laundry list of humiliation. Lots of medical professionals causing them pain without knowing or caring, lots of being forced to go places and do things against their will, with their wrist mostly twisted by adults. It's strange. These medical issues are of the sort that can preventative measures can be taken against, routines and habits most people are taught. Unlike this person, I am careless and lack these. Yet I haven't reaped nearly as many negative consequences for it as they have. They're habits supposed to be taught to children by parents, but I suspect it doesn't happen nearly as often as it's said. At least, I can't remember my parents helping me develop these habits, not once, but I can't remember a lot of things; it's likely it happened and I just forgot. Though I have a memory where I need their help and they forget to give it. Maybe they don't notice. To be honest, I think my mom's forgotten about these lost habits of mine, since they cause little to no issues. Occasionally she'll give me grief for an unorthodox solution, and we'll laugh. I've started keeping planners. I try to pencil things in.

I started university last year. I've been going outside a lot recently, more than I have since 2019. I go out on my own, too, which is new, and never a thing I did as a teenager. I take the subway to my school, and then I come back. I went to a small convention last weekend with some friends, both of whom started navigating cities on their own as children. They walked me back to my subway station, and one of them told me to try to not be in the convention's area after dark, because it's a dangerous part of the city. I told her I felt that vibe before, during the day; I was pleased to be validated. in a way, I felt elated to go somewhere questionable, because I never do. One of these friends has such a long list of chronic health issues that, even after five years of friendship, I'm still surprised by him casually mentioning new ones that I could swear he's never mentioned before. one of the first ones he told me about was asthma. writing about it, I think about how my argument with my mom started by telling her about my breathing problems, which she said shouldn't exist: I don't have a deviated septum or anything.

Me and my friend both got sick after the convention. I had been sick the week before: I'd had a nose cold. part of my breathing problems includes a predisposition towards... I call it allergies, but I don't think it's anything like that. what it feels like is a sensitivity to the cold. when the temperature drops and circulation in my face stops working properly, I start sneezing like crazy, constantly, all the time. I also become prone to head colds of this sort, but rarely ones that are "serious" enough to merit staying home. it's all really difficult to talk about, for a simple reason: it's gross, and that makes it humiliating.

despite feeling better for several days by the time we met up, I was worried I had passed my bug onto my friend. Then he told me he'd been having a fever for two days. I never have those. I can't remember any specific fever I've ever had before 2022 or so, though I can remember having a fever sometime as a kid. when I got my covid vaccine and woke up with a fever in the middle of the night, I couldn't recognize my symptoms at all; I actually ended up finding the experience really fun.

I figured I hadn't passed anything onto my friend because I had heard about conventions spreading disease, and I had also gotten sick. though this might not have been from the con; my sibling had been sick recently, too.

The symptoms of my new sickness were different from the previous one. Similar at first: I had the head cold and whatnot, I couldn't breathe through my nose. I started mouth-breathing while sleeping, which usually happens when I can't do the opposite. then I got a sore throat, which is also a common thing when I have to breathe through my mouth at night. I started coughing. My sibling's cold had made them cough restlessly day and night, too, so I wasn't alarmed.

A few days ago, I want to say around monday the 16th of june, I started feeling another thing, which was familiar and yet foreign. a throwback to my childhood: an ache in my chest that didn't go away, no matter what I did. A sense of discomfort that made me cough. A presence in my lungs. It was like a cousin I hadn't seen in years, and at first I struggled to recognize it. One of my first thoughts on waking up was a memory: I thought, "I feel like the wheezy penguin from Toy Story", and I remembered how I said that same thing as a child, and my mom laughed and laughed. I like making my mom laugh, but ever since then I've felt defensive about the analogy. This happens a lot; I express myself often in very literal comparisons, and she tends to find them gut-bustingly hilarious. I've learned to wield this power to make my mom laugh when she's sad, which is noble, but it's a wild horse and not a tame one. Sometimes I will say something and mean it, and it will be incredibly fucking funny, and I will not be making any sort of joke. I like being funny on purpose, and I do this all the time, but now I can't help but wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I was really bad, for most of my life, at identifying how I felt. This was and still is the reason for the analogies. Explanation is easier to me with an example, or with a model. I spent a very long time observing and not feeling, or not understanding how I was feeling, and to this day I still do this to relax. I like reading things I don't understand, witnessing them, and not existing while I do; subsuming myself into another person. I like to take breaks from being: to do this I read essays criticizing Thoreau, who I've never read, or political vague-posts, whose points of reference escape me, or certain forms of entertainment, ones that fill your head nicely, like pudding in a cup. (That's another very literal analogy, I mean it as literal as I can: I want you to think of a glass cup full of pudding, which was molded perfectly to its shape. Observe the small imperfections of its surface and think about how sweet it is. It can have cream on top, if you want). I think I exist when I think, which is similar but not the same thing as Renée Descartes said. I'm not good at thinking unassisted, but I think I become a person when I talk or write or play videogames, because it forces me to think in a way that reading doesn't.

Lately, I've been practising feeling things like human beings do. I feel something about that discomforting presence in my chest. I would call it fear. The problem with calling feelings by name is that the names are simple. The benefit is communication, both with yourself and with others, but it takes a few thousands of words to accurately explain the shades of these emotions. It scares me, because having health problems is always scary, even knowing that they'll go away soon (it still hasn't). It's not that it reminds me that my body is fallible, because the problem isn't that my body is fallible: the issue in this moment is that my body has already failed. I'm not scared about a potential breach of the hull: I am scared of an active water leak, because the water leak in and of itself is scary, even if it doesn't lead to demise.

I'm also worried / stressed / afraid outright at how it hampers me. I struggle to go outside when I'm sick. I'm in active pain, which is misery, mild as it honestly is. I have exams soon, which are a similar problem. I've gotten over, by now, the problem of failing: I have acknowledged repeatedly out loud the worst consequence (flunking a class and having to re-take it), and I think it's perfectly fine. I've even begun planning my next semester around its outline. So I'm not going to die. That doesn't mean the exams themselves aren't scary, or the cough, or the water leak. They make me upset and tired, and frankly I disagree with their existence, though not in any way where I can construct a better alternative. I spend entire days lying down nowadays, upwards of my already-generous daily average of six hours bed-rotting with my phone, somewhere northwest of thinking. I can't talk without getting winded and the thought has begun to gnaw at me it might, finally, be covid - after five long years where I lucked out. I feel better today than I did yesterday, and I felt better yesterday than the day before. I'm hoping the sickness works out in my favour; sometimes that's the only thing you can do.

In a way it's reassuring. I have something that I feel about, and clearly. I can stay home. And I didn't get my friend sick, or at least I don't think I did. In a way, it's fun to be sick, to be feverish or in pain, because to some degree it absolves you. It's like being financially dependant on someone else, because it is, in fact, being dependant on someone else, both financially and otherwise - transcending finance, as it were. It's nice to have a magical reason to struggle, a vitamin deficiency or a deviated septum or a pulmonary illness. It's not that it's an excuse: I think it's because it's a reason. It's also vulnerable. This is fun, in its own way. Vulnerability often makes me feel detached from myself: I am someone else's doll. I don't think I need to say that this is terrifying too. Genuinely, incredibly scary. For most of my life, I wasn't taught to think, though, so it's familiar and comforting.

I was taught to speak without being taught to talk, and I was taught to walk without being taught how to travel. Lately I've been trying to catch up. I'm not sure if arrested emotional development is a sickness, but I think it shares something with disease, because it's also humiliating to experience, because it's difficult to talk about. And I think (anecdotally) that this is all self-perpetuating. It's difficult to speak about, because it's humiliating. The humiliation comes from not having the words to speak it. When you have less embarrassing language to describe an experience, it can become easier to discuss it. Framed this way, I think one of the greatest failures of medicine is how its diagnoses can turn into insults. About this problem, like many others, I think there's no way out except through.

The first time I heard about the idea of hermeneutical injustice I started crying and didn't understand why I felt like that; paradoxically, the term "hermeneutical injustice" itself righted a hermeneutical wrong in my head. I keep forgetting the first word in the sentence and struggling to look it up online: "word injustice" only returns definitions, "concept justice", "conceptual injustice", none of these provide answers. I look up "sexual harassment term origin" on duckduckgo and I read about its history. Then I look up "epistemology injustice". these aren't the right words, but this finally gets me close enough: it turns out I bookmarked the wikipedia article on "Epistemic injustice" with the name "epistemological injustice" for when this happened to me again. I cannot for the life of me remember when I did this, or where I heard about hermeneutical injustice, or what I was writing when I bookmarked it. I remember I was writing something, though.

For most of my life, I wasn't taught to think, or at least I can't remember it. In fact, there hasn't been a time in which thinking wasn't hazardous. I don't think I've ever been encouraged to do it. My thoughts don't feel sought out, though I think they've been and I just can't remember it. This is like the lost habits, a little: I don't know how to like my thoughts if nobody models this. I am trying to learn. I am trying to write, and to talk, and to play videogames. I can't talk recently. I haven't had the time to play videogames, though there's some I'm looking forward to. They require I sit up straight and breathe in the cold air at my desk. In summer, that's nice. I've been writing recently. a lot of this text has been me, finding a way to express why.

I've got ADHD and autism. Those are the clinical names for why I forget things and make new ones up, and why I can't understand what I'm feeling. I don't think they're why I'm experiencing arrested development. I think they enabled it, though. I had to argue a lot with the adults in my life to be diagnosed. I don't know if my mom will ever understand why I wanted it fully, though I think to some extent she gets it. If you were to ask me, I would tell you about the vitamin deficiency and the deviated septum and the pulmonary illness. I am a couch potato. Now I have a verbal shield to defend my usage of the term "spoons". I still am a lazy bum. Now I can talk about it. I righted a hermeneutical injustice: I didn't know what was happening to me. Now I have a name for it, and therefore I can know it. I don't know it yet. If I knew it, I wouldn't be writing this. I would have already named it. In every academic text you will read, whenever they come up with a new thing or discover it, a new model or object of the universe, the first thing they'll do is give it a name. All things are like emotions: a name defines it. Now that it's talked about, it exists.

The term "sexual harassment" is an example of a righted hermeneutical wrong. It was a humiliating thing that had no name or shape, and then women spoke up, and they made one. I was once pinched in the ass while walking down the street, maybe; I may have made it up. I struggle to remember it. I'm not an authority on the subject, but I think I've only been catcalled once.

I say things sometimes, just to say them. I'm thinking them as I do. I can't remember the last time I was asked for my thoughts on something. I can be trusted by my friends and family to give them unsolicited. I would like to be asked, but I don't want to ask people to ask me. I'd like to be bought flowers, brightly-colored with large petals, maybe lilies. I want to have a thought so good that people want more. This is also the pulmonary illness, the vitamin deficiency, the deviated septum, the legal definition of sexual harassment, the shield. I covet that daydream of validation so terribly it makes me do things I know will hurt myself. I will share things I know will feel humiliating to have shared. Then I have nightmares about my digital footprint. I keep baring myself to the elements and asking someone to care. I keep trying to express something so well that someone will read it. I have spent so much time with my mind filled up by the words of others that the only goal I can ever aspire to is for my words to fill up someone else's. I'm terrified that when it happens I will forget, or that it has already happened and I forgot. It feels inevitable that I will be so consumed by my self-deprecation that when it happens I will miss it. It reminds me of being a child, when I was lonely and understood nothing. Well, it reminds me as much as it can: I've forgotten a lot of my childhood. This is all humiliating to express. Please bear with me as I clear my throat.

#longform #✨ #🌕