The Kind Of Cold That Never Really Goes Away

Well, I’ve finally got it.

My boyfriend had it first: sinus and cough and general misery. I got a glimpse of it last week: I hit a high fever (for me) of 98.1, when I usually run a cool 97.0 — but I felt like I was sweating and flushed. I managed to work through it, but it came back last weekend harder and stronger and now I’m afeared that it’s turning into one of those…

…The Kind Of Cold That Never Really Goes Away!!!

You know the kind: you catch it in the late summer, it stays with you as the weather gets colder, and it finally starts to wane with the spring thaw. For the better part of a year, you’re tethered to a tissue box, wavering between cancelling and seriously considering cancelling plans because you “just feel like crap.” The kind where you spend the whole autumn and winter in sweatpants, swaddled in blankets on the sofa, keeping up with the Kardashians.

This is the vision we have of how this cold will progress… but remember how it starts?

In the late summer months, when it is still steamy and muggy. The pressure of the humidity outside is almost no match for the pressure inside of your sinuses, and the 80-degree-plus temperatures wreak havoc on those fever sweats! All you’ll want is to cuddle up in your bed with a hot wash cloth draped over your aching face, but with the air conditioner churning full blast, your hot compress dries out too fast and the blankets you wish to burrow in are oppressively hot.

“Maybe I’ll go outside and get some fresh air,” you naively muse. But when you do, the sun smacks you on your hot and prickly skin. You’ve only just stepped outside, but you’re panting and sweating and wheezing already. You thought the trudge to the subway was long? Phuh! It’s nothin compared to the endlessness of this illness.

By the time the leaves depart their tress, your sense of self-awareness will be as dulled as your sense of smell from that endless stuffy nose. Woe betide the grocery clerk who asks a cursory “How are you doing?” as you unload a shopping-list of symptoms onto their unsuspecting ear.

By now you’ll feel like, if you don’t even see the “recommended posts” at the bottom of this blog, that I whine about my colds fairly often. Meghan, do you feel compelled to blog about it EVERY TIME you get sick? Which is a valid question. Instead, perhaps you should be asking, could this be the SAME COLD you blogged about LAST TIME? Has it never really left, only lay dormant for a period, to give me a glimpse of what non-cold life was like before cruelly yanking it away from me again???

Perhaps. We’ll know for sure when —— or if —— this one ever goes away.