The cough that hangs around
THE PULSE · NO. 1
Thursday 1 October. Open Sky, Mullumbimby.
Early spring. Crofton weed out, wind still up, cold nights.
Waning gibbous moon. Sun in Libra.
The big thing in the room this week was coughs. Not the sick kind. The leftover kind. People who had a cold or a virus, it went, and the cough just didn’t. Three weeks later, five weeks later, still there. Worse at night. And tired, really tired, more than makes sense for how sick they actually were.
It’s spring in the shire. The Crofton weed is flowering, the wind’s up, and the season hasn’t settled into itself yet. This is the time of year I see it most.
Here’s how Chinese medicine reads it, and I’ll keep it simple. In this medicine the Lungs do two jobs. They breathe, obviously. But they also look after the surface of you: your skin, your sweat, your first line of defence against whatever’s going round. Every breath is an exchange with the world. Something comes in, something goes out, and the Lungs are the part of you that decides where the edge is. A boundary layer between internal and external - what is ‘you’, and what is ‘not you’.
Community clinic, Open Sky, Mullumbimby
The cough isn’t the illness any more. It’s the lungs trying to tidy up with nothing left in the tank.
When a virus comes in, the Lungs do the work of clearing it. That takes a lot out of them. So what’s left afterwards is a bit of residue, and a pair of lungs too worn out to finish the clean up. It’s the system trying to tidy up with nothing left in the tank, and not yet back to its ordinary rhythm.
There’s a principle in that which runs through everything I do, not just coughs. The thing that disturbed you can be gone and your response to it can still be running. We know this from emotional life. A hard time passes, circumstances change, and the body stays braced anyway, organised around conditions that no longer exist. A cough that outlives its virus is the same shape in a different tissue. The event has ended. The system hasn’t finished responding to it.
That changes what you do about it. You don’t go at it harder. You support it. The old texts make a distinction between clearing what’s left of the invader and feeding the reserves that do the recovering, and the balance between the two shifts as an illness runs its course. By the lingering stage it’s mostly feeding. On the table that’s a few points on the forearm and the upper chest, where the Lung channel runs, and a conversation about rest. At home it’s warm food, soups, mushrooms, early nights. And not going straight back to full speed the first morning you feel a bit better, which is a common thing.
Warm food, soups, mushrooms, early nights.
Two more things from the same way of thinking. The Lungs and the Large Intestine are a pair in this medicine. One takes in and distributes, the other lets go of what’s finished with, so it’s not unusual for a cough to come with a change in your bowels. Sometimes a chest clears through the gut, and I’ll warn people about that. And because the Lungs look after the surface, a worn out pair means you feel the wind more, sweat at odd times, and catch everything.
The classical texts also give the Lungs a soul of their own, the Po, the animal spirit, corporeal soul, bodily part of awareness: breath, sensation, the plain fact of being here in a body. I mention it because it’s a useful reminder that recovery isn’t just chemistry. It’s the body relearning that it’s safe to open up again.
What stays with me from this week is timing. We tend to measure being well by how fast we can get back to what we were doing. The body doesn’t work on that schedule. Sometimes the useful thing is just to notice that something has passed while its effects are still being digested, and to give that its own time.
The wind is still moving through the valley. Spring’s here, although the nights haven’t entirely let go of winter. Maybe the body needs a while to notice the season has changed too.
Recovery has its own rhythm. Listen to it before you ask it to go faster.
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Related reading: Get Your Feet Off the Cold Floor · Rooms Have Weather · The Cosmic IP Address · Ticks and Alpha-gal Syndrome
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