Yankees 7, D-Rays 3

Well, that was interesting.

Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I was laid up with coughing that felt like lightening bolts inside my chest (and reminded me of my younger bout with asthma, the affliction that prompted me to take up jogging), along with dry-throat choking that was the breathing equivalent of bone-on-bone, plus a fever that crept ever upward.

In college and grad school, I used to bargain with my illnesses, managing them off so that they fell between semesters, or if necessary after large exams. One memorable Christmas Day, 1985, my mother drove me to John C. Lincoln Hospital in Phoenix, where my throat and fever were attended to by Jewish doctors who had traded their chits so they might have off Passover and Rosh Hashannah.

I think, in middle age, I'm approaching something much like the reverse of bargaining: that is, illnesses that specifically avoid weekends and vacation time and falls smack in the middle of work.

Case in point: I'd accumulated enough vacation time to take Monday and Tuesday off every week, plus a full week in August. This one week, the start of the second half of summer school, would be the lone exception.

This week happens to be, famously, the most boring sports week of the year (outside of the three weeks between the Super Bowl and pitchers-and-catchers-report, the regular season of the NBA having long since lost their allure for me). I'll watch the All-Star Game next year, in (Old?, do we call it that yet?) Yankee Stadium, but, really, after three months of the Yankees and Astros, I needed a break from baseball as much as they did. The only glimpses of baseball I watched all week were when Home Run Derby went an hour-plus over and I had to keep re-configuring the DVR to make sure I caught all of the first episode of "The Bronx is Burning." Then it was back to Friends with Money, or whatever Astro-Girl and I watched that night. Of the All-Star game, I saw the last out, and accidentally.

So: no sports to excite me, and no vacation to entice me.

Bingo: this was the week to get sick.

A lot of illness and fever has gone around in Houston--which, starting the night of my bachelor party (May 31st) straight through my wedding day (June 2), then through all of June, then through half of July, gave us 45 days of rain out of a possible 47. Essentially, the wind kept blowing in off the Gulf of Mexico and kept the same cloud bank in place for a month-and-a-half. When I was first laid low, I thought: Hmm: damp, rainy, bad chest cold, nothing. As the rain beat outside, I settled in for a comfy two days off and all twelve hours of Brideshead Revisited on DVD.

When, Thursday morning, I lept out of bed in a coughing and choking spasm, I recovered my wits and then thought: Hmm, off to the doctor.

And to the verdict.

Pneumonia.

No, really: pneumonia. And I suddenly felt like a heroine in a Bronte novel, whose first delicate cough was a prelude to a deathbed scene fifty pages hence.

I guess I had "walking" pneumonia, because I was able to have the perscription filled under my own power.

And here's the good part.

A day with the inhaler, a day-and-a-half eith anti-biotics, and the illness retreated at least over the nearest bluff and let me concentrate on . . .

Tonight's game. Pettitte solid, A-Rod, Jeter. Only one game, but nice.

This is the patch of season to make their move and win games in bunches.