The common cold

Is there any torment quite so loathsome as the misery engendered by the common cold?!

The question is – naturally – rhetorical by nature, so please do not furnish me with lists of your own (or others!) alternate afflictions. I am still suffering the agonies of my own particularly virulent strain of the aforementioned and thus not in the mood to accommodate those either soliciting sympathy or offering outrage.

Sorry!

There is a point – when struck by the first prickle in the throat and the first uncontrollable urge to cough at an inappropriate moment – that one raises one’s eyes to the heavens and prays silently to Asclepius that, on this occasion, one might be spared anything worse. There are times when this prayer is heard and answered. There are others when it is not.

Once the tickle in the throat turns to a stabbing pain when swallowing – or to an acuate agony on sneezing – all is lost. The next trial comes at night when, waking abruptly, one finds oneself unable to breathe and apparently incapable of containing the contents of one’s nasal cavities. Not long then until the sinuses fill and the excruciating sensation of having a steel band slowly tightened around one’s head and face takes the mind off lesser evils. It is at this point that one recognises that standard ‘girly’ tissues are simply not up to the job and it is time to trek to the store to stock up on the ‘man-sized’ equivalent.

This stage of the painful process can last for days, during which the constant need to minister to throat and sinuses leaves one’s body racked and exhausted, and the constant ingestion of an assortment of pills and potions plays havoc with one’s gastrointestinal tract. Then – if one is singularly unlucky, and just as the symptoms seem set to ease a little – the cold moves onto the chest! The tightening of the ribcage is at first accompanied by that dreadful, dry, hacking cough – the body’s reflex to expel something that apparently does not exist. Later on it will do so, of course, and one then finds oneself aghast that one’s organs could ever have contained such vile material…

Quite enough of that – I think…!

The true agony is not – however – physical at all. It arises from the realisation that – when all is said and done – one is not really ill… one merely has a cold! As a result (and with apologies to those of you who are bringing up small children and can thus not do so at any point) one can’t actually sanction ‘throwing a sickie’…

Shame!