Girls trip turns into one big sneeze when Michelle gets sick in Chicago
“I need a teeny, tiny vacuum to suction out my sinuses,” I told my husband. I had been sneezing and coughing for a week. Thankfully I didn’t have COVID. Just a really nasty bug.
Seven days earlier — on a girls’ trip to Chicago — I sneezed my first sneeze and unleashed the beast.
At the time, I was sharing a hotel room with my BFF, Lydia, a super-human lawyer who never gets sick. On Day Two of the trip, Lydia accidentally used my toothbrush. (Both our toothbrushes are neon orange. What are the odds?) Her immune system didn’t even flinch.
“Illness is mind over matter, Shell,” she told me. “I’m not sick because I don’t want to be.”
“And you think I do?”
“It’s not what I think. It’s what YOU think.”
“I think you’re nuts!” I said.
A packet of Kleenex rested on my pillow and I clutched a bottle of DayQuil to my chest. We were supposed to be visiting Shedd Aquarium that morning but the only place I was visiting was the bathroom.
Since I was too sick to accompany Lydia sightseeing, she declared me a photo op.
In one picture, I’m lying in the fetal position, cradling a bag of Hall’s cough drops like a baby. In another, I’m propped up in bed with a wad of tissue stuck to my nose.
I sent the photos to my husband, Mark, so he could see what he was missing.
“Lydia’s been really nurturing — for her,” I texted him. “She’s brought me food and water.”
My best friend drove us home a day early, while I snored in the passenger seat.
“She’s all yours, Mark,” she told my husband, before passing me off like a football.
His response upon seeing me — “You poor thing!” — was music to my clogged-up ears.
Unlike Lydia, my husband takes his nursing duties very seriously. He immediately administered an at-home COVID test — my third one of the week, all negative — before taking my temperature (99.9; but who’s counting?) and tucking me in bed.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, after plumping my pillow.
“Chocolate,” I croaked, “with a chicken soup chaser.”
I was asleep before he set them on the nightstand.
