That' snot funny

It happened. I’ve caught my first cold of the season. The first stages of a cold are always the worst. There’s that scratchy, uncomfortable cotton feeling in the throat and the pressure that starts to build around the sinuses that somehow sneaks up on you. I knew it was going to happen, despite all my positive thinking and my attempts to control my body. I really try to use that whole “mind over body” thing and it failed finally and so now I sit, slightly congested and really annoyed.  I’d really rather move into stage two and just get to the coughing and nose blowing. At least there seems like there’s more control there.

It’s a pretty amazing thing what the human body does to defend itself from sickness and infection. It’s a real sacrifice of the good of the many for the good of the one dogma. You’re throat gets scratchy because when a cold virus gets in one of the cells, your body responds by destroying the cell and any other cells around it. As more cells get infected, your body commits mass Hari-Kari and dumps tons of cells, thus making your throat feel raw and dry. But in the process of this mass destruction your body is actually protecting itself.

The same goes with the mucus and congestion in your head. It’s your body’s way of fighting the  illness with an all out assault. It’s an inconvenient system but it works and it all happens without any of our conscious participation.  

I get very grumpy when I get a cold. Well, more grumpy than normal. I am quite typical as a man that way. So I’ll take some cold medication like Dayquil to try and help my body defend itself, however the active ingredients in Dayquil make me extremely loopy. I get kind of a lazy, druggy lethargy and tend to wander off into imaginative flights of bizarre fantasy. So I’m grumpy and trippy all at the same time. I’m Trumpy.

It makes concentration difficult.

What was I saying? Oh, right. Concentration.  So as I was saying, getting a cold sucks. It sucks more when you have to drag your disease ridden body to work and try to function at the level of a fully healthy person. It’s why Americans are so sick all the time because we don’t follow the European model and just stay home when we’re sick. We go to work, sneezing and rubbing our snot all over everything, infecting the rest of the work force. Instead of taking care of ourselves at home, under a nice blanket, bowls of soup and cups of hot tea, we go to work and struggle to make it through the day.

Having a cold puts damper on all the fun that could be have, but maybe it’s a metaphor for the human condition. I mean, we are frail flesh pods who think they are in control of everything, but then, the smallest of organisms, a virus, can knock us off our high horse and remind us just how weak and porous we really are.  Yeah, I said porous.