Last week as I listened to my students coughing their way through an exam, I wondered how many viruses they would turn in with their test papers. I now know the answer: enough to make me sick for days and days and days. (Frankly, given the amount of coughing going on in that room, hand sanitizer wouldn't have put a dent in the problem. To contain that kind of outbreak, you'd need nothing less than napalm.)
My weekend was a dead loss: coughing, sleeping, coughing, sleeping, blowing through a whole box of tissues. On Sunday I never even left the house. Felt a little better on Monday, well enough to teach my classes as long as I carried tissues everywhere I went, but I'm not sure any of us got much out of the experience.
I don't teach on Tuesdays so this morning I cancelled my office hours, slept until nearly 7 (!), lounged around coughing and drinking hot fluids all morning, and parked myself in a sunny spot on the sofa to respond to student drafts. The bright sunshine made my laptop screen hard to read, but I could feel the sunshine driving the sickness out of my body and I just couldn't move away.
Now I'm on campus again for some afternoon meetings. I could have gone to two meetings this morning but decided they could proceed just as well without me. I'm not carrying tissues and, at the moment, I'm not coughing. Tomorrow I expect to be pretty much back to normal, whatever that means. Soon this whole sorry incident will fade into the dim and distant reaches of memory, where it can't hurt anyone any more. (Because napalm lives there and kills all the germs.)
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