I’d like to think of the spring of 2016 as the end of my larval stage. Much like the humble caterpillar, I too experienced my insides turning to mush as a hard chrysalis formed around my juvenile exterior. Would love to get out of here someday.

Without going into too much extraneous detail, I’ll cover the gamut of what this all entailed. I was a white (still), 16 (not anymore), sophomore football player, covered in fresh acne, and free of my three-year-old braces (thank god). Picture what Tom Clancy believes is “normal” for a high school kid and you’ve about got the picture. I also had a lightly used 2015 Mazda 3 that I didn’t work an ounce to afford (still do and I’m never letting it die). With all this context, perhaps you may come to believe that the tempest I’m about to describe was karmic balance. Let me correct the record there. The only weight that could level that scale would cause an instantaneous supernova the likes never before seen in the Virgo Supercluster (born in September and full of hot air, I’m something of a Virgo Supercluster myself).

I lived primarily in my mom’s duplex about a mile away from school. For some reason dreamt up by the malignant justice system of our time, I spent Thursdays and every other weekend in Mansfield, TX in my dad’s mid-life catastrophe McMansion. After a battle that lasted three years (not the first and certainly not the last), they’d finally gotten divorced one year prior. Like the Russian Revolution, it was a long overdue systemic change that I’d been quietly championing for years, but the ramifications… oh the ramifications.

Sometime in mid-February, I developed a persistent dry cough. Nothing serious. The kind that you chalk up to allergies a few days before you’re in the emergency room getting morphine shots for the flu (a story for another time).

Let’s return to Mansfield, where the only things to do are run from wild dogs and punch holes in drywall. That was a decade ago, though. By now I’m sure a fleet of Oakley-clad dads in Chevy Suburbans have run over all the dogs.

I lay in bed. Coyotes screamed under the winter moon and rapped on dusty windows. One of them managed to get in the garage and start the car, but it didn’t know how to get the thing in gear. Over all this din, I coughed. I coughed out more air in one heave than I thought could fit in the human lungs. Not ten seconds would go by before another fit struck. For hours I lay curled in the fetal position on my twin bed, begging whatever god would listen to make it stop. It would. Not. End. Through the blinds I watched the stars turn in the sky. I kept coughing. At some point I finally fell asleep and dreamt that I sucked the whole of the Sahara up through a plastic straw.

It persisted. The first of three different pediatrician visits followed soon after. Diagnosis: bronchitis. Treatment: none. “No fever and not actively bleeding? Get the hell out of my office.”

I can’t escape my own title, so I might as well do away with the tease. You, humble reader, have likely, no, CERTAINLY clicked on this review with a question burning a hole through your scalp: “Is whooping cough for me?” Take my sanitized hand, as I, a recipient of this divine punishment, venture to answer this question for you.

Let me skip straight to THE BOTTOM LINE: Whooping Cough… is a disease for babies. It renders you down to a helpless little ball of meat. You can’t breathe. If you try to breathe, you vomit. If you eat the wrong food, you vomit. If you eat any food, you cough until you vomit. This inevitably leads to tears and unintelligible screaming that keeps everyone in the house awake at night. You become a general burden, only valuable as long as you can maintain a modicum of cuteness in the moments you aren’t raising all hell.

You want medical terms. Fine. Here’s a summary from the Mayo Clinic: Whooping cough, AKA pertussis, is “a royal pain in the ass”. That’s what it says.

Once infected, cough symptoms arise after 5 to 10 days. Another couple weeks and the eponymous “whoop” starts. “This causes rapid coughing that can’t be controlled…intense coughing attacks may cause:”

Vomiting

A red or blue face

Extreme tiredness

A high-pitched “whoop” sound during the next breath of air

I ran through these bullet points fast. After the first doctor visit, the whooping started in earnest. It is an unnatural, godforsaken sound unique to this particular disease. It is nature’s own Stuka siren, designed through the miracle of bacterial evolution to terrify and disturb both the infected and any other poor bastard within a country mile. Like how the Jericho Trumpet gave away the incoming German dive bombers, however, the signature whoop led me to discover just what kind of insurgent had hijacked my immune system.

The coughing “attacks” escalated to full on blitzkriegs. I’d be sitting in a chair, and the next moment find myself flopping around on the floor like a fish on a dock. My lungs burned and my eyes leaked. At home, I got used to ducking into the closet so that no one would hear my death rattles. It was during one of these visits, my face streaked with tears and my throat full of sand, that I figured out what I had. A few google searches involving “cough” and “banshee screech” led to this very video. It matched my symptoms exactly and provided as much comfort as commiseration ever can.

At the second doctor (crusty, white-haired, old-fashioned type that everyone’s had the displeasure of going through), I was dying but armed with my self-diagnosis… which got shot down. He shipped me off with a kick in the ass and a steroid inhaler, which didn’t work but at least it made my coughs feel wetter and greener for the next year.

In the meantime, life went on and the cough worsened. Everything revolved around it. The attacks intensified enough to cause vomiting. Breakfast, the love of my life, became the most fearful part of my day. I couldn’t put down a granola bar without it coming back up on the walk to school. This happened, sans hyperbole, at least three times a week without fail. The physical consequences were bad enough, but the psychological effect really smarted. I could never predict when it would happen, so I spent every waking moment on edge, always keeping in mind the best place to drop my cargo when the need arose. I barely ate lunch at school. Peanut butter jelly sandwich and a bag of pretzels every day. Nothing that would remotely upset my stomach or throat. I learned the price of greed. One night I ate what amounted to a whole rotisserie chicken out of a black Styrofoam box only to subsequently return it from whence it came. A long, sad shower followed.

On a walk to football practice, I had to pull over into the bushes and retch for five minutes. I couldn’t blame my buddy for leaving me behind. At my first ever concert (Bronze Radio Return), after the high of meeting the band and getting a signed poster, I coughed until I vomited in the cupholders on the car ride home. During chemistry class, an attack came on, and I sprinted to the bathroom to spew in a toilet with some privacy, albeit on my hands and knees in a piss-soaked high school restroom. At least the waffle-scented vape classed the place up a bit.

I was a 16-year-old football player with a Napoleon complex. I constantly stressed about calories and protein. I wanted to be the biggest and strongest. I wanted to weigh 200 lbs. I’m 5’7” for Christ’s sake! The heaviest I got was 185 during junior year. I was a bowling ball. They called me Blake the Cake on account of the bakery I was running in the back. This was not a joke to me. It was what I had. I hadn’t seen La La Land. I didn’t have movies or piano or tabletop RPGs or game development. I’d practically left reading behind in middle school. Football, aside from playing video games and eating double doubles and autopiloting schoolwork, was what I did. I never expected to be the best at it, but I at least wanted to be a competitor, to be respected for the effort I put in to try at being a player worthy of the field. If I couldn’t eat, couldn’t run, couldn’t participate, I had nothing. I was nothing.

I went to a third pediatrician. She showed enough empathy and due diligence to give me a nasal test for whooping cough. Negative, of course, but worth a shot. I got some cough syrup out of that one.

My parents, despite their new cold war, formed a momentary alliance to get me to a pulmonologist, where I inhaled my first breath of fresh air in a month. He immediately recognized the whoop and got me a blood test. One call from the CDC later and I had an official pertussis diagnosis with antibiotics to spare. They didn’t do anything, but the medical establishment could rest easy knowing I wasn’t contagious anymore.

Welcome… to the 100-day cough. The mystery of how I got it will collect dust in an unsolved case file until the sun goes dark. If you were ever an infant, and your parents aren’t insane, you received the DTaP vaccine at 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 15-18 months, and 4-6 years. At 11-12 years old, you get a TdaP vaccine. Turns out, the vaccine effectiveness of Tdap against pertussis wanes to 8.9% after 4 years of vaccination. A little math, and my 16-year-old odds were lower than one might think. Why me then and not someone else? Why didn’t I get anyone else sick? I sure as hell would’ve heard about it.

It was a bittersweet anticlimax. I was right, but I couldn’t do anything about it. It lasts three to four months, and all you can do is grit down and bear it.

In football offseason, they handed out shirts based on weight room maxes and suicide (the run) times. I opted out from the running because I didn’t think the turf needed another coat of paint. They gave me a red shirt, the lowest possible color, which I wore dutifully and shamefully every day (as Hawthorne prophesied).

Food forfeited all pleasure. I continued to ditch class to make out with the toilets. Everyone knew that I was “the guy with that disease babies get”. In football, when you’re injured, you’re invisible. Sometimes our head coach positioned me to guide the guys between the exercise stations that they could literally see. I felt more useless than a white colored pencil. I became convinced it was never going to get better. At 60 days into the 100-day cough, I couldn’t perceive any difference from day 1. But I couldn’t ever get used to it. The KGB trained this little bacterium to administer punishment at the perfect intervals. Just when I got comfortable, it would levy a wheezing attack. Or make me vomit just when I thought the worst had passed.

But time marches on. I stayed on top of my schoolwork, made lifelong memories with people I’ll never see again, and managed to get through the offseason just lifting. The cough got better. By May, I could operate normally without worry, only conjuring the old evil whenever I upped my BPM by more than five.

For my first summer job, I wanted to be a lifeguard. Such a prestigious and demanding position required a three-day training certification, which required a test of physical fitness. When I finished the 300m swim, exhaling water but otherwise ebullient, the instructor pulled me to the side. He said while I technically passed, I should really consider learning how to swim. I didn’t tell him that a month ago I would’ve drowned in my own sick after the first half lap. I felt like I’d come back from the moon.

My lungs were as porous as damp brown lunch sacks, but they worked. My 100 days were up; no time spared for good conduct. I worked the pool, got a tan, kept a careful watch on the moms kids, and went to the gym every day. My stamina returned little by little, though I still winced any time I felt even the slightest cough come on.

One night, in the middle of the summer, one of my fellow guards threw a party at her parent’s house while they were out of town. It was the first classic high school party I ever went to–a bunch of 16 to 18-year-old kids getting not as rowdy as popular culture would expect and extracting more life experience out of a small act of rebellion than society would ever lose from their transgression. I stuck around for maybe an hour, said my hellos, and left. I was, at the time, a teetotaler, at least as much as someone a decade older than the Civil War was long can be.

We all woke up the next morning at 6AM for in-service. When I arrived, I saw not only the pool manager and a group of tired, hungover lifeguards, but also a semi-circle of stern looking white guys in khakis and starched polos. Turns out, the party host’s sister came home unexpectedly that night and ratted her out to their parents, who were (drum roll please)… cops. What might’ve been a bit of textbook suburban family drama escalated to a couple members of the city council and the head of the parks and recreation department putting the fear of god into the team of pimple-faced kids entrusted with the aquatic safety of the municipality’s toddler population.

Instead of standard in-service, which involved playing with CPR dummies and light flirting, we had to swim a mile. In my opinion, a little corporal punishment beats an MIP any day. We dove into the pool in a wide variety of different (mostly negative) spirits. I, in that cool water under a cotton candy pink July summer sky, experienced an apotheosis. One lap in. No cough. No pain. No tiredness. A quarter mile. Nothing. At a half mile, I thought my heart rate might actually have slowed down. I could’ve swum forever. My lungs worked. I didn’t cough. I was alive. It was one of the most serene and peaceful moments of my entire life.

So like, don’t get whooping cough. But if you do, or maybe if you have it right now. It does get better.