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Blogs by Sondra Quinn
Love in a Haze of Mentholyptus 1/6/2007 4:46:42 AM
Every year right about Thanksgiving, my husband gets the mother of all colds, and he doesn't really get over it until sometime the following September, by which time it's almost time for him to catch the next cold. The cold morphs into an allergy that sticks with him in the form of lots of painful coughing and many gut-awful noises on his part—especially something that sounds like a combination of a goose honking backwards and a donkey blowing its nose. I get so used to the noises that I don't really pay attention to them anymore, but other people aren't so… understanding.
When we went to Europe a few years ago, we were traveling from London to Dublin via bus and ferry. The London air was not kind to any of us, we were all congested with teary eyes and tickly throats. My husband had it worse than anybody, with his cough coming back in full force.
Now being shut up on a bus for 15 hours is no one's idea of fun, but being shut up on a bus with someone who is coughing non-stop is more than some people can take. I slept most of the time on the bus, (I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat) and my poor husband coughed. We were seated across from an elderly woman who glared repeatedly at my noisy seatmate. Several times she ordered him to stop making that noise, as if the coughing were deliberate and he could shut it off at will. Seeing as how I was inhaling the fumes of enough mentholyptus to fill a 19th century tuberculosis ward, I knew that my poor husband was doing everything possible to control the cough, which he told her several times. She was not satisfied, however, and continued to berate him every time he had an outbreak.
Finally I leaned forward and gently said, "Ma-am, he can't help it. He has lung cancer." My husband uttered a non-genteel word or two and grabbed my arm, but by then it was too late. The words were out of my mouth and could not be taken back. I heard my daughters snickering from the seat in front of me.
The woman stopped and looked at me. Then she shut up. We didn't hear another word out of her for the remaining six hours of the bus ride—except for when we had to get off the bus for the ride on the ferry. At that point she was very solicitous of us, making sure we knew exactly what to do and where we needed to go.
I am not sure why his coughing became more tolerable to her when she thought he had cancer, but I am glad that it did. I love my husband- truly, madly, deeply- as the words of the song go. When you love someone, you love the whole person- not just the romantic parts. There's nothing romantic about a persistent cough, and, for my husband's sake, I wish he didn't have to deal with it. But as long as he does, I'll be there to leap to his defense, even if it means leaving a trail of people behind me who are somehow left with the impression that he has lung cancer!
