Summer Cold

It's been a few years since I come down with a cold; and I'm unsure whether I've ever had a summer cold at all.  "They say" summer colds are actually more common, but I've never been sure how anecdotal that is, and how much allergy symptoms inform what we define as a "cold" during warmer months.  Whatever the proportion of science is to wisdom, between the copious rains, swinging shifts in temperatures outside, extreme air conditioning inside - and its just being my turn - I have a summer cold going on.

And, being a writer and overly fascinated by my own experiences, I'm going over all these sensations in my head.

Sore throats SUCK.  How I could stand all the years of bronchitis I endured during The Ohio Period of my life, I look back and cannot fathom.  (Except that I was a horrid little drama person back then, and almost certainly stood nothing of the kind, likely whinging for attention all the way along.  It did get me some attention; I still remember Beloved Ex coming over to take care of me, and watching the extremely brief comedy routine of Diane On Codeine of an evening before I passed out completely.)  The memories of the pain are what come back to me at the moment.  My esophagus suffered the arid cold up there in agonies still clear to me more than twenty years later.  The scraping-by-glass-shards pain, the coughing up of copious amounts of blood.

I haven't missed bronchitis, nor any manifestation of respiratory disease.  So, having my first fairly bad sore throat in several years, it's easy to recognize it as very much less distressing than those I had in my youth.  This hurts, but I feel like I keep bracing for it to become as bad as it used to get.  Say what you will about summer colds being "the worst" - with heat and humidity the like of which we're having down here, there is simply no chance my entire mucousal support system will evaporate in the dry and cold, leaving me sucking up steam in the bath which almost hurts the wounded interior of my breathing apparatus.

Even so, my initial assessment, yesterday morning, that I was not "sick enough" to stay home, did endure a revision.  I stayed at the office for about two hours, and shortly after my nose decided it was time to run I called it a day.

Sick sneezes are worse than allergy sneezes.  My brain is currently too medicine-muddled to quantify this eloquently, but the short of it is that ordinary sneezes don't *hurt* thanks to swollen-up everything-inside-the-headbone.  Elegantly phrased, yes, I know.  Hey, we're just observing (and I can hardly discern the letters on the screen), so give good writing a break.

Swallowing is its own worst reward.  And you can NOT not do it.  Ugh.

Talking really does hurt.  Enjoyed doing the crossword over the phone with mom (we haven't done that in a while, and I love it), but chatting was perhaps an error.

The older I get, the more of a petulant, icked-out child I am about swallowing cold syrup.  Gross.

Three naps and I still went to bed by ten.  Which is odd, given that, actually, sleep is the WORST thing for breathing, when you have a cold.  All the raw and sore things exacerbate badly in sleep.  Bleah.

Eating seems to help.  Fantastic, given that I am not exercising and had JUST managed to lose about ten of the forty pounds I put on in the space of the last year.  Just great.  Drinking water seems a neutral stimulus.  Drinking hot chocolate, I know, would feel very good indeed; I have not yet actually made any hot chocolate, though I did stop at the store just to buy milk when I left work yesterday morning.  Genius.

My next-door neighbor, as I have noted in the past, remains The Best neighbor in the history of ever, and I've had some good ones.  She is a great blessing of a human being.

The headache I could live without.  But then ... yeah, all of it, I guess.  Duh.

Oh how I want to take a nap ...