Thank you, Donna, for the suggestion. I don’t know whether it’s the silver or the sugar that’s done it, but it went from a full-blown upper-respiratory awfulness to pretty bearable in 15 minutes, and I got some sleep last night in a stack of about 6 dense pillows—hard to get up this morning, I was so comfortable. Actual sleep, and the upper-respiratory crud on the run: I’m still having the chest-cough thing, but diminishing and I can get off the Dayquil/Nyquil stuff that were keeping me in too great a fog to work.

The one bad thing in all of it—I’d done an algae treatment on the pond before I collapsed, and we lost 2 of our fishes, not Ari, who’s still among the wounded, but two others of our mid-sized adults…I don’t know why just them; but it was due to something I didn’t see until I surfaced midway through the respiratory crud: we’d had a strong wind blow up from an unusual direction and blow the round winter cover from its mooring on the north side of the pond across the skimmer intake on the south side of the pond, blocking its ability to collect dead algae, and reducing the oxygen level in the pond—it was a complicated accident, one that Jane didn’t spot because she doesn’t handle the pond, usually: I do, and I’m not even sure I told her I’d put the algae killer in. I certainly didn’t anticipate the winter cover getting loose and blocking the intake: Jane went out and fixed it, and then another blow dislodged the fix again. After we lost the two fish we did a partial water change and then I got out the 100 lb test line and made a new mooring line, that has held fast. On an ordinary day this would have been a non-incident, but the algae killer piling up a skin of dead algae where the surface gas-exchange process happens at the same time I was unexpectedly too sick to stand on my feet and too stupid to remember to ask Jane to check it, and the old mooring string broke free, it was just, well, one of those many-moving-parts type accidents. Bummer.