I have a cold. I hate having a cold. I am miserable.

Having a cold is so inconvenient. It interferes with almost everything, and seems to come when you are at your busiest, or are pressed to get some important work done, and now you don’t feel like doing it. Of course, I’ve never heard anyone say, “Things are caught up in my life, I think I have time to have a cold.” Having a cold just doesn’t elicit that kind of thinking.

  The aggravating thing about having a cold is that it makes you feel bad, but not quite bad enough to stay home and sleep it off, which is what you want to do. If I do take the time to rest, I can’t relax worrying about what I’m missing, or what I’m not getting done, and who is having to do it since I am malingering. 

Not working makes me almost as miserable as working with a cold. When I do manage to drag myself over to my desk, what I produce isn’t fit for the hogs, if I had hogs, and if they could eat words. How is it that a cold affects brain function? I guess that’s why they call it a head cold.

If I do take the time to rest, I can’t sleep. My head is so stuffy that I can’t breathe except through my mouth, which gets so dry that my tongue sticks to its roof, and I can’t swallow and end up either drooling, or jerking awake as I gag. The alternative is that I flip and flop, trying to find a comfortable position where my head will clear enough to allow me to sleep, and I end up so contorted that I feel like a bat hanging from the rafters, and if I could, and if it would allow my head to clear, I would.

I don’t feel so bad that I can’t exercise, but doing so hurts. Every time I bend over to pick up a weight, I feel like someone just shifted a like amount of cold steel in my sinuses. Swimming when one has a cold is out of the question. First, the cold water on sensitive, aching skin is pure agony, but a fine form of torture if you are into such things, and second, diving under water to any depth greater than 6 inches brings about a pain like your head is being squeezed in a vise. If I go to the gym to box, I am looking for relief. There is such a thing as having the snot knocked out of you, but with my head already throbbing, it seems an extreme solution. I accept that I am reduced to watching exercise videos, but somehow, they don’t get the job done.

There isn’t a thing in the world that can cure a cold, but tell anyone you have one, and they have a remedy. Some obscure, female relative whose genealogy is questionable, has usually handed it down, and as you are being told about her, you hope that the town of Salem, Mass. is not mentioned. You most often end the conversation by promising to try it as soon as you get home, having full intention of doing no such thing, and hoping it is a long time before you see this person again, not wanting to discuss the cure, or more probably, the lack thereof. 

I do admit to having certain things that I do to relieve the symptoms of a cold. The admiral is big on hot, herbal teas, and they do provide some relief, but their use can cause some unpleasantness. The old saying is that you don’t buy beer, you rent it, making reference to how fast it passes from your body. The adage holds for herbal teas as well, the difference being that the tea is a lot less expensive than beer. You can take conciliation knowing that going to the bathroom that often must be causing you to lose weight even if it is water weight. 

The thing that bothers me the most is the loss of the full use of my facilities, my senses of smell, taste and hearing. I find it almost intolerable that all my food tastes like nothing, or at best, cardboard. I know it is only temporary, but what if this is the big one, the cold to end all colds, the one that stays with you for years, or maybe, forever? 

I can’t hear because my ears are plugged up, which makes conversations with the Admiral, who rarely speaks above a whisper, and tends to trail off her volume as she approaches the end of her sentences, a real challenge. I’m irritable anyway, but having to say, “What’d ya’ say,” or “Huh,” a hundred times a day and listening to the echo in my head is like fingernails on a chalk board. 

I find that one of the only activities I can participate in is the watching of TV since my eyesight is not diminished, the sneezing and watery eyes notwithstanding. The problem with this activity is that I am being yelled at to, “Turn that down.” I’m only heavy-handed with the volume control because I can’t hear it.

Another thing I hate about my ears being stopped up is that I hear too well when I chew the cardboard served as a meal. I can’t stand the crunch, crunch, that reverberates in my head with every bite.

I am miserable. I want to crawl into a hole and die, but I keep telling myself, “This’ll be over in a week, or 10 days, or …maybe never … . Oh, just shoot me now.”

David Wilson Atwood is a local writer whose human-interest columns offer a unique perspective. He may be contacted, and his other works viewed at: www.starchasers.us, or david@starchasers.us.