If you’ve followed the Epitaph tour on Facebook, you’ll know that I’ve been traveling sick and getting sicker by the day. I joked about having the Doc Holliday Memorial Cough, but by the time I got to Denver, it was clear that I couldn’t keep going.
The diagnosis is pertussis, a serious respiratory illness that can last many weeks. The cough is exhausting and painful — so bad, my doctor did in fact consider it necessary to rule out TB as well. I’ve been forced to cancel next week’s events in Beaverton, Seattle, Pasadena, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Santa Rosa. The San Antonio Book Festival on April 11 is still on; I should be over this by then.
I urge all of you who were immunized as children to get Tetanus Diptheria Pertussis boosters; immunization wears off in adulthood. This is a bitch of an illness and its most contagious the first week, when you think it’s a bad cold. My sincere apologies to everyone I came in contact with in the last three weeks. I feel terrible about this in more ways than one…