As I write this, I'm recovering from what my friend Jan Flora calls "the Kachemak Crud." For the past week I've had a runny nose, a cough, a slight temperature and general body aches. I feel like microscopic robots have crawled inside me and beaten up my muscles with tiny ball peen hammers. I've been hacking up yellow-green phlegm that looks like Spawn of the Blob That Ate Detroit.

I've had a long life being intimately acquainted with colds, flu, pneumonia and those fun little illnesses that lay you low and make you feel like you've seen the gates of Saint Peter glowing on the horizon. That's why I take all this talk about a flu pandemic seriously, and will get the swine flu shot when it comes.

I have to. I have asthma.

With H1N1 2009 romping through Homer, I first thought I might have gotten The Big S. I don't think so. I never got a high temperature, and while I felt sick as a dog, I didn't feel as sick as a dog that ate week-old garbage, a moldy Xtratuf boot and last winter's moose kill the general description I've heard of swine flu. I think I got a garden variety rhinovirus.

I know the flu, at least the usual seasonal kind, and I try not to get it. It's why I get a flu shot every fall. I know what happens when I don't get a flu shot.

That would have been the winter of 1994-95, when I first moved to Homer and got so busy building a cabin and such I forgot. I got the sniffles. I got the hacking cough thing. My temperature spiked, and before I knew it I had visited the ER on a Saturday afternoon. A chest X-ray and a prescription for antibiotics later, Doc Eneboe told me I had walking pneumonia.

"Being sick as a dog" has been a common experience for me, going back to my childhood years when I'd get any bug that hit the ancient Army barracks classrooms of Lois Elementary School in Tampa, Fla. not to mention the usual childhood diseases. Outside of the polio vaccine, we didn't have a lot of vaccinations back in the 1960s. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, you name it, I got it. Everyone did. I remember getting the measles in first grade. I missed learning the letter "R," and my mom had to give me alphabet lessons at home.

Doctors didn't give out antibiotics like candy back then, and kids didn't want them. You toughed out a cold because if it got really bad, you got The Shot. No kid wanted to get The Shot, a big jab in the butt with a fat syringe full of penicillin. That pink syrup kids get now? Nope. It was The Shot or nothing. You had to be really sick to get The Shot.

I must have driven my mother crazy with worry all those times I hacked and wheezed, watching the mercury climb on the thermometer. Mom would wipe my forehead with cool washcloths, feed me chicken soup and push the orange juice. I had a live-in medical team. My mom had a year of nursing school before she had to drop out when she married Dad yeah, they did that in the 1950s. Of course, I had Dr. Dad, too. Between the two of them, they kept me from death's door.

While no one enjoys being sick, when I get laid low, I find a bizarre serenity in the mind-altering state of illness. I have weird dreams. My body feels like a bad-fitting suit. Life gets reduced to simple things, like breathing, eating, drinking and sleeping. All that matters is getting well. I take comfort in traditions: hot soup, orange juice, trashy novels and television. This round of illness I've been rewatching the final season of Battlestar Galactica. Any starship port in a storm.

Getting sick has been made worse by another chronic illness: I have asthma. Only a few times have my lungs betrayed me so much I feared I'd never draw another breath. You don't know how precious working lungs can be until your chest compresses so tightly inhaling and exhaling is as heroic as climbing Mount Everest.

Thanks to some good doctors and amazing wonder drugs, I have my asthma in control. With a good medical plan, as long as my health insurance company doesn't randomly switch a drug from tier 1 ($7 a prescription) to tier 3 (take out a second mortgage), I can afford the four asthma drugs that more or less keep me breathing.

That's the goal: Keep breathing. I try to keep breathing well enough to live a normal life. I can ski from Lookout Mountain to Diamond Ridge slowly, but I make it home. I can walk from Diamond Creek to Bishop's Beach. I can kayak from Land's End to China Poot Bay. I can try to live as long as possible, and not die.

Getting sick, sick as a dog sick, makes you realize how delicate a peace we've made with the hostile virile fog that's part of our biosphere. Some nasty influenza strain dormant since the late 1950s mutates, comes back to life and infects a whole new generation. It kills not the old and the weak, but the young and healthy. It lays low teenage athletes in peak condition and misses middle-aged asthmatics.

I hope. I'm hoping this pandemic fizzles out, and that the seasonal flu stays its usual slightly-deadly thing. When that swine flu vaccine comes in, it's babies and pregnant women first. If there's anything left over for an asthmatic like me, I'll take it.

And try not to be really, really sick as a dog. Woof.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at Michael.armstrong.@homernews.com.