It started with a little girl, a schoolchild.
“She has a bit of a cold,” her mother said as we all sat down to eat lunch. “But she’ll be all right.”
And I’m sure she is.
I, on the other hand, soon felt that I had been eating my egg salad sandwiches with the grim reaper. Or near enough.
For from that little girl I acquired a cold. A common cold. Something I rarely get.
But when my common cold does come along, it is a tsunami of a cold. The first symptom is the build up of water pressure behind the eyes. So much pressure in this tender area that when I blow my nose, it seems as if an eye will pop out and skitter across the floor, not unlike a pickled onion.
If you have ever had a real cold you will know that your nose flows like the oilsands. Same volume, same colours — with such non-stop frequency that I expect the arrival of environmental picketers.
And when I blow that nose, the geese foraging in the cornfield take flight and diesel trucks on the highway five kilometres south punch their air horns in sympathy.
The only thing that interrupts the nose blowing is that I must leave space for my cough, which starts with a slow rattle and ends like a demolition derby.
Then, there is the fortunately unseen quease of the stomach and the fluidity of what may lie therein — which, by fall of night, seems to be the remnants of the lining of your large intestine. But over this I draw a veil.
Perhaps it would be more seemly to mention the effect of the common cold on the ears of the sufferer. If you go out — and you do, for you need nostrums — you will find yourself blowing your nose at the drugstore counter. And somewhere in the line a very small child will say, “Daddy, that man’s ears are squeaking.”
And indeed they are, for a cold underlines that strange connectivity in our heads.
As for the nostrums you buy, none of them actually works, although your purchase does help support a multibillion-dollar industry that is clearly based more on hope than expectation.
I have gone through a trove of remedies, many produced by gleaming laboratories and others ground out by superannuated hippies. I have swigged, snuffed, snuffled, inhaled, swallowed and rubbed in the hope of ending the cold. But it has all been for naught.
When I was much younger, I favoured a course of cold treatment that called for a bottle of scotch and hot water with a bit of lemon juice. Take as needed. Preferably often.
In my memory this seems to have had some effect. I do believe that if you consume enough scotch, you will pass into the land of dreams.
And when you eventually wake up, the cold will be mostly gone. Mostly. The only problem is that you will now have the hangover from hell.
One of the other problems with the common cold is that those of us who have one rarely get the sympathy that we so greatly deserve.
We toddle into the office with our boxes of tissues, packets of pills and bottles of water. Even heating the odd potion of beef tea on a candle in our cubicle. Yet people say, “Oh, don’t mind him. He’s just got a bit of a cold.”
I need more sympathy than that.
How I envy that lucky guy with the quadruple bypass. When he staggered into the office, absolute crowds gathered around to watch the fluorescent lights glitter off the titanium screws holding his chest together. (Or what was left of it.)
Of course, he had to go home in an ambulance but he got the sympathy that we cold sufferers always seem to miss. Some people have all the luck. IE
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