P. NEW MOAN EEEYAH.

As reported last week, and the week before, I spent most of the past week in a place called Pagosa Springs Colorado. Pagosa Springs is about sixty miles east of Durango, about thirty-five miles from the metropolis of Ignacio, where the double-named Indian grew up to represent Colorado in the United States Senate (he’s not there any more, thus apparently showing some Native American wisdom.) It is about fifteen miles west of Wolf Creek Pass, also. If you triangulate all that on a map, you’ll see that the edge of the world is visible from downtown Pagosa, but still, you’re not exactly there yet. (That would be in Rudolph, Ohio, as I recall.) It’s at about 7600 feet above sea level, or just a French knot over 2300 meters if you prefer. I think. It’s pretty high. So, when I was wheezing, I just figured that I wasn’t used to that sort of altitude any more, and I also wrote down a very interesting night to food poisoning from one of Pagosa’s fine restaurants. (Don’t panic, Chamber of Commerce, I’ll be back. Stuff happens, I know that.) The trouble is, I was wrong.

I know I was wrong because when the plane landed on the low terrain of Las Vegas, Nevada (about 2000 feet, which is close enough to one-and-a-quarter kilometers for my foreign friends) I still couldn’t breathe. In fact, I was feeling worse than I’d felt in years. Many years. I put it down to Influenza. The county offered me a shot for almost nothing but I didn’t go in (I will now though.) So, of course I figured my idiocy was in not immunizing myself against a common scourge. Thing is, what I’ve got, while it sort of looks like the flu, ain’t the flu at all. What it is is revealed by reading the title of this article aloud. Go ahead. I can wait. I’ve had it before, the last time just about fifteen months after moving to a new state and starting a whole new life. That state was Minnesota, and I was in grad school. Now, here I am in Nevada (the anti-Minnesota, in so many ways) and the same thing happened. Interestingly, no such effect surfaced when I moved to Colorado. That’s not much endorsement, though, because it was in Colorado that the cold I had morphed into the thing I’ve got now.

There’s no moral here; I just want to give anyone who cares a friendly warning that if for some reason you can’t breathe properly, you have aching muscles and feel sort of like maybe it would be comfortable to just up and die, you could a pneumoniac. I made up that word, by the way. Heck, if you’re one of Jeff Foxworthy’s many fans, you could be a Redneck pneumoniac. Don’t laugh, it could happen. But, after all, there is a cure for pneumonia. One pill a day for fourteen days. It’s now seven hours after my first dose, and finally I’m beginning to recover. I can feel it. Which means that next week’s article, or next year’s article if you prefer, will probably even have a bit of humor in it. Hey, you never know.