I am coughing all night folks, and all day too. I cough until tears explode from my eyeballs and my eardrums threaten to shoot out my ear canals. I cough until my lungs are halfway up my air pipe, and all my muscles are a twitching, uncontrollable frenzy.

I also cough through the night until my husband turns over in frustration and piles pillows over his head.

Poor thing, I do feel for him. He needs his precious little sleep before the pre-dawn trek to work in the morning, and being constantly woken up by my resounding hacking is not helping his cause, and after three days of interrupted sleep and long hours at work he has developed a certain redness around his eyes and has lost his appetite.

Do I feel bad? Of course.

Will I go and sleep elsewhere?

No. I am too scared to sleep alone in my mum’s house because it’s dark and the corridors are narrow and the lights upstairs don’t work and it creaks something terrible.

Last night I woke up at 4 am to see him pressed up against the furthest wall, wrapped in a cocoon of blanket with a pillow covering his ears.

I tried my best to be quiet, I really did. I coughed silently and when I couldn’t keep it in any longer I ran outside to cough.

This used to be a yearly thing for me. Every year, when winter waned into spring, there would be a cough for me to suppress in class, a cough for me to turn heads towards me in public, a cough for me to battle for weeks on end with no respite, and by the end of it I am a wilted, bushy haired, shrivelled up sparrow.

When I was at uni back when I was doing Accounting, my Economics lecturer was so concerned about my constant coughing that he left the seminar to get me a packet of Halls. We didn’t know he’d gone for that reason, and when he marched back in and determinedly placed it on my desk, I was mortified amid the rolling laughter of my fellow students.

Nothing stops it, though. Not Halls, not inhalers, not cough medicine, and not even good old lemon and honey. I shall just have to live this one out, as I have done all the other annual hacks of shame,  and make sure I do take PLENTY of lemon and honey, and pray it doesn’t happen in a few minutes when I have to face a classroom full of six year olds and attempt to teach them something worthwhile.

Also hope D doesn’t come down with it because he will still go into work while poorly and it will be horrible.

Aaaah.

That looks delicious.