Yes, I'm sick. I have a nasty, unwelcome cold (yeah, like a cold is ever welcome!) that has rendered me absolutely useless, whiny, and annoying to everyone around me for the past four days. OMG, FOUR DAYS? If I'm only at day four--and feeling worse rather than better, that means this will not be a quicky seven-day virus. No no, oh joy of joys, this will likely be a ten-day reign of infectious terror that will ravage every cell in my aging body.
OK, so I'm being a tad bit melodramatic. It's just a cold, right? It could be worse; it's not like I have the Swine Flu or something. But man, what is it with colds? Shouldn't there be a bodily limit on how many colds one has to endure in their lifetime? If there were such a limit, surely I'd have met mine long ago, after catching most of my daughter's colds, my husband's colds, and the colds of many a sneezing/germ-spreading student when I was a teacher for a decade! I've had more than my fair share of colds in my forty-two years, if I do say so myself. Sniffle.
Think about it: doctors say that there are over 100 viruses that cause the common cold (which, just FYI, is why it's not possible to cure a cold...because it would be impossible/impractical to diagnose which virus a person is infected with at any given time); they also say that the average person gets up to 4 colds per year. So with that bit of enlightened medical insight, shouldn't I have had every single cold virus possible by the age of 30...at the latest?! Yeah well, so much for statistics. They should revise that to say that the oh-so-lucky-few-and-far-between get 4 colds per year...the rest of us get screwed. Cough.
And what is it with cold medicines anyway? Why can't they make one that actually works? My left nostril is so plugged that I'm getting a migraine trying to breathe through it, and there is no decongestant that works for me. Yet it says, right on every decongestant box I've ever read: temporarily relieves nasal congestion due to the common cold. Do they really expect us to believe that it worked on the lab rats, but it's not gonna work on us? Or is it just one big pharmaceutical lie...something those drug-makers sit around laughing about at our snot-nosed expense? Sniffle.
But puh-lease don't tell me to breathe through my mouth. There is nothing worse than the duty breath and chapped lips that result from breathing through your mouth. Like it's not bad enough that I'm sneezing every five seconds, blowing my nose enough times to single-handedly keep Kleenex in business for the next 40 years, and snoring loud enough to wake the dead (and The Hubs!). Yeah, I really want to have breath that smells like poo and cracked lips to boot! I think not. Hack.
I just want to breathe, people. Is that asking so much? I'll tolerate the lethargy and nose-blowing, and the occasional coughing. I'll even put up with the incessant sniffling. But just let me breathe--through both nostrils! Seriously.
A-choo.
