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… sucks. Seriously. As if you didn’t know.
When I was a kid, I used to get a serious cold once a year. And I don’t mean just a fever and a stuffed nose either. I’m talking getting so hot you start shaking, inflamed ganglions and injectable Penicilin until you can’t sit up straight – that kind of cold. It got to be so bad at one point that my parents seriously considered having yours truly go through a tonsillectomy. They have thankfully decided against it.
On the flipside, when I turned 18 I magically became impervious to this particular disease. Sure, I’d get the sniffles sometimes in the winter, or wake up with a headache and a mild fever every now and then, but never much worse than that, and then only for a couple of days at the most. I could walk a few miles in the snow and then eat an ice cream with a snowball chaser and I’d be just fine. At one point it started getting ridiculous. I remember, for instance, an episode of walking about 5 kilometres in the rain, bare-chested – shirt was already soaked, so there was no point in keeping it on, was there? – then having a hot tea and suffering no consequences whatsoever. Or having a swim in the Black Sea on the 1st of May – the water was about 10 degrees Celsius (or 50 Fahrenheit, for the folks across the pond) – again, no consequences worth mentioning. I was 20 an the time and yes damnit, it was a dare, and there was a girl involved.
Ahem. Anyway. Seeing that I was starting to become way too cocky about this apparent iron health of mine, Santa decided that I deserved something really special this year: a viral bronchitis with high fever, racking coughs, headaches and a general state of deep unhappiness about the world in general and my big, fat, blabbering mouth in particular. The later being guilty for tempting fate no earlier than the beginning of December last year, when a meteoric episode of the flu got most of my colleagues, while skipping me for some reason – which at the time seemed normal, and now just pure blind luck. So I’ve managed to spend Christmas and New Year on a diet of Paracetamol, hot tea and Strepsils, going through about a cubic meter of Kleenex and generally feeling sorry for myself.
The highlight of that hellish week though was the conversation I had with my doctor. Please note that my voice was gone at the time – I was at that particular stage of the disease known by the connoisseurs as the „Leonard Cohen”. It went somewhat like this:
Me (in a deep, ragged voice): „Doc, I think I got bronchitis.”
Him: „Yes, I think you got a flu virus, it’s been a bit of an epidemic lately. I recommend you take some Paracetamol, drink lots of tea with lemon and honey and stay in bed. If you do that, you’ll get rid of it in about one week.”
Me: „Can’t I do anything to make it go away faster?”
Him: „Not really. In fact, if you do absolutely nothing, it will still go away in about one week. Paracetamol makes it more bearable.”
Which brings me, rather forcefully, to my point: here we are, XXIst century and all, up to our teeth in high-tech, space age and all that… and still out cold whenever a puny virus feels like having a go at our respiratory system – and yes, the pun was intended. We haven’t eradicated the common cold – in fact, we’re not even close – and the best our doctors can offer is just one step above the willow bark they were prescribing three thousand years ago. There are reasons for this, one being that this particular virus mutates like crazy1. So there’s no easy way to target it with an antiviral drug. The best we can do is shooting up a neutered version of it and hoping that our bodies generate antibodies that are effective against the strain „du jour”.
So if you got the flu this season, my heart goes out to you. Drink your tea with lemon and honey – vitamin C is good for the immune system, and your throat also can use some relief -, take your Paracetamol and weather it out. And although technology didn’t help with the remedy, it will at least keep you entertained.
After all, those Middle Ages willow bark eaters never had an Internet connection.
- In fact, a particularly nasty variation of it, known as „the Spanish flu” killed a few million back in the 1920’s. [↩]