I’ve never had a serious illness. I had most of the childhood stuff (measles, chickenpox, etc) but never more than a bad case of the flu as an adult. Three or four days of feeling shitty.

In November (2015) I came down with some kind of upper respiratory thing and after a week I went to see a doctor who said I had something called parainfluenza. Different from garden variety flu and not prevented by my annual flu shot. This dragged on for a few weeks before an X-ray showed I had “a nasty case of pneumonia.” They gave me a serious antibiotic which helped but a followup X-ray two weeks later showed I still wasn’t out of the woods. New/different antibiotics did the trick and as I write this I believe I’m out of the woods. Feeling much better.

Seven weeks. Better part of two months. According to Wikipedia, it can take as long as 12 weeks for folks over 65 to fully recover from pneumonia. That is a long fucking time to be sick. I like to think there is something to be learned from every experience, especially the bad ones. But it’s too soon for me to say what that might be with this one. I’ll let you know.