You know things are bad when the highlight of your week is drinking purple-flavored codeine cough syrup. "Codeine" is a Latin word that means "this is not a good time to use the extension ladder," and, while codeine doesn't actually cure respiratory illness, it can make you temporarily forget that you have lungs. I had been hoarding this precious amber bottle for years, a keepsake from my affair with whooping cough in 2005. The bottle was half empty and long out of date, but I kept it safe in my bathroom cabinet, knowing that I would need it again some day.

And then the H1N1 flu came to my school.

Like everyone around the country, I had been watching news reports about the progress of the H1N1 virus, making checklists of the symptoms as I developed them, because I wanted to have "H1N1" and not just plain old "seasonal flu," which sounded like something I should send out cards for. I was careful to call my illness by its Christian name, "H1N1," and not "swine flu," out of respect to the pig, a noble creature who gives us bacon and who, unless he was in my fourth hour English class, probably did not give me the flu.

The symptoms, when they came, were just as the news had predicted. Fever? Check. Headache? Check. Coughing? Check. Feeling like you have fallen face down in wet cement and will have to spend the next decade embedded in a patio unless someone shows up with a backhoe really soon? Check.

The most unusual symptom was an intense pain in my eyes, which I had had for two weeks and which I had blamed on the fact that I teach 7th grade, a profession which involves extensive frowning and furrowing of the brow and is why so many teachers look like Richard Nixon in their later years. Eye pain is hard to treat. It's not like you can put little tiny ice-packs on your eyes. Darkness provided some relief, so I took to periodically clapping my hands over my eyes for several seconds, sort of a personal game of peekaboo, a strategy that Brooke, my carpool buddy, did not enjoy even a little bit.

The bubonic plague killed half the population of Europe in the 14th century, but it did not move nearly as fast as the Newcastle Pandemic, a germicidal assault in which dozens of sweaty children came to school each day for the express purpose of coughing on each other. School officials tried to get ahead of it by making frequent announcements about handwashing and providing each teacher with bottles of hand sanitizer, but, as more and more kids dropped in their tracks, unable to drag their 62-pound backpacks to the office to call home, these measures seemed futile.

By the end, were huddled in small groups in our classrooms, passing around the hand sanitizer and toasting our fallen comrades. "Remember Chandler?" a kid would say hoarsely.

"So young," someone would murmur, and the group would cough in agreement.

"Here's to Nick," someone else would say, amid the crackle of coughdrop wrappers, and we would all try to sweat appreciatively.

Because I have highly developed skills of repression and denial, I made it through the first two weeks of the outbreak relatively unscathed. But, as students and staff collapsed around me, the pain in my eyes got worse, and by the third week, I, too, had fallen. After making sub plans, I went home to die.

Because I live alone, there is no one to hear me whimper, feel my forehead, or bring me grilled cheese sandwiches on command. So, squinting against the painful light, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt down over my eyes and crawled into my sleeping bag on the couch. Lying there helplessly, coughing from some place down around my appendix, I felt like one of the 6,000 flies that come into my house every October to die. I could hear them buzzing feebly and slowly banging themselves against the sliding glass door before dropping onto the tile floor.

Suddenly, I began to worry. What if this happened to me? I have always been a bit of a hypochondriac, given to describing my illness in Old Testament terms to anyone who will listen. "Yea, though I watch TV in the valley of death," I moaned into the phone, "I've had a good life." I took a suitably dramatic gasp. "Don't cry for me, Argentina," I began again.

"This isn't Argentina, this is your mother," my mother said firmly. "Go wash your hands again; you'll feel better."

She was right. I missed three days of school and spent an entire weekend with a blanket over my head, but it looks like I will survive the H1N1 flu. As always, after a crisis, I become profoundly grateful for all that I have in life -- a warm house, a few cans of soup, health insurance, substitute teachers. Sipping the narcotic goodness of that purple cough syrup, I knew that I was luckier than most.

Mary Kettl is a junior high teacher in Newcastle. Write to her at mary.kettl@hotmail.com.