Baby, It's Cold Outside!

It starts with a tickle in your throat and progresses to a feeling that significant parts of your brain have been replaced with cotton. Gradually, your eyes begin to water and the tickle in your throat moves up to your nose. You pray for a sneeze to relieve you but it doesn’t come. You blow your nose, and five seconds later you blow it again. You blow it so often that you ask yourself where it all goes. How is it possible for the human sinus cavity to contain so much fluid? Your nose mutates into a raw, red pulp that aches at the very thought of a tissue. You’d love to sleep but you can’t breathe through your nose. You snore. You wake up with lips so dry and flaky that it looks as though someone has applied orange lip liner to the outside of your mouth. The combination of your raw lips and the flakiness of your nose ensure that you look the way you feel.

Your voice is nasal and you can’t pronounce hard consonants. You catch yourself breathing with your mouth open, and wonder if you look like Corky. Your appetite is fine but you can’t taste anything - the joy of eating lost in one of the many dozens of sopping tissues at your side. You start to cough and can’t stop for minutes at a time. Your body is convulsed and you can’t prevent the odd projectile from escaping the racking of your lungs.

You try to bargain with it. Maybe this is mostly in your sinuses and the coughing won’t last long. Or maybe if you take one afternoon off work, you’ll catch up on your sleep and it won’t get any worse. You tell yourself it isn’t that bad. That you can suck it up and just keep going. But what you really want to do is crawl under a thick blanket and have someone bring you a tray of soup, tea and tissues with lotion. You want to cry out for mommy and have her tell you how to make yourself all better. You take vitamin c, Echinacea, tea with lemon, and contact C. You do everything you can think of to make it go away, but you know it won’t. Not until it’s good and ready. And you realize that all you can do is stay home, take naps, drinks lots of fluids and wait. You have a cold and that’s all there is to it. It’s okay, you don’t suffer alone, I’ve got one too.