Friday, January 23, 2009
Page 11
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)
Nothing Common About This Cold
By J’AMY PACHECO
Boy, as if I didn’t have enough going on in my life right now, I’m being subjected to a medical malady – acute viral nasopharyngitis. Some people say it’s just a common cold.
I say there’s nothing common about what ails me.
I suspected something was up when I met my brother and his family for breakfast Sunday. We ate outdoors, and it was windy enough to feel like the Santa Anas were thinking about kicking up.
Before we finished eating, my eyes itched and watered, and to my great embarrassment, I had to use paper napkins to deal with my nose. (The alternative was toilet paper. Somehow, the napkins seemed like a better option.)
I’d had a cold the week before, but it seemed to have gone by Saturday. I managed to convince myself that Sunday’s breakfast episode was caused by an allergic reaction to something in the moving air. Because my symptoms died down significantly in the car, I was pretty sure my self-diagnosis was correct.
I changed my mind late Sunday night while staring up at the ceiling and wincing each time I swallowed, because my throat hurt – a lot. I must have gone through half a box of Kleenex trying to keep up with my nose.
Adding insult to injury was the fact that in a half-awake, cold medicine-drugged state, I’d imagined that each Kleenex I pulled from the bedside box was actually a towel. I tossed and turned, worrying about how much trouble I was going to be in the next morning because of all the towels I’d used.
Talk about your fever-driven delusions – how could I have gotten in trouble if I’d used towels? At my house, I’m the one in charge of towels!
By Tuesday, my throat had pretty much stopped burning, but my head started throbbing. Even pain relievers did little to stop the aching in the place from whence my thoughts are supposed to come. Most of those thoughts went like this:
“Ow. Ow. Owwwwwwwww.”
Wednesday, I got a really big surprise. When I leaned far forward to feed a document into the fax machine, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming burning sensation in my nose – sort of like how it feels when I jump in a swimming pool without plugging my nose.
I didn’t even have time to wonder what was going on when…well, I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say even having a Kleenex in hand wouldn’t have helped. Towels, maybe.
Kind of makes you want to have lunch with me, eh?
Although that happened once more the same day, that part of the cold seems to be over. As I write this column, I’m in what I hope is the final phase of this week-long torture: the coughing fits.
You know the kind – they require cold sufferers to keep a cup of hot tea and a full bag of cough drops handy at all times. The coughs come on suddenly and without warning – usually when the cold sufferer is in the middle of a telephone conversation.
So now I’m starting all my calls with a disclaimer: if I start coughing, I’m okay. I’ll call you back.
Most people I’ve spoken with cluck sympathetically. But I can tell when the coughing starts that they’re checking their caller ID boxes to see if I’m phoning from a tuberculosis ward.
It continues to amaze me that we have microwave ovens, tiny, powerful computers, satellites, spaceships and some of the coolest video games imaginable – but we can’t figure out how to cure the common cold.
I read on an occasionally reliable Web site that the common cold is responsible for 75 to 100 million doctor visits each year in the United States, costing about $7.7 billion.
Americans spend $2.9 billion on over-the-counter drugs for symptomatic relief, it says, although there is no indication of whether or not that includes Kleenex, or towels.
American students miss 22 to 189 million school days each year due to colds (See what I mean about reliable? That’s a relatively big spread…) and cause their parents to miss as many as 126 million work days to stay home to care for their children.
On my desk, I’ve got three kinds of cough drops, cold medicine, hot tea with honey, ibuprofen, acetaminophen and Kleenex — and I still have a runny nose, cough, and very little dignity.
I don’t think the world’s going to end with a bang, or a whimper. When the time comes, I think we’re going out with a giant, head-splitting sneeze caused by the common cold.
Bless us all.
Copyright 2009, Metropolitan News Company