Health Matters

I have a cold.

Normally when I get a cold, it starts in my throat. My throat doesn't feel scratchy as much as it just feels wrong. The cold stays there until it decides whether it's going to my nose or going straight to my lungs.

This time it decided quickly. Yesterday, right after lunch, my throat felt wrong and I tried to pretend it was nothing. Then it hit my nose with a vengeance, and I grabbed some Sudafed from my Bag of Tricks I carry with me. It could have been allergies (which I don't really have), but then I wanted a cup of tea. Not my usual black tea with cream and sweetener. I wanted that one teabag of chamomile tea that's been sitting in my desk drawer for at least a year.

There was no more denying it. I was getting a cold, and the box of Kleenex on my desk was almost out. By the time I left work, the box was empty and I had broken out the travel pack of Kleenex from my purse.

It's exhausting fighting off a cold. At 7:30 I wanted to go to bed, but I couldn't, because my son called and wanted to come over to look at the cool wooden box I brought home from Poland in 1997, because he needed a box for his new film that he and his partners are making (I get to star in this one. Well, not star, but I have a small role.) and he remembered that I had one.

So we looked at the box, but although it was cool, it was way too small. We looked at his sister's cool wooden jewelry box, but although it was cool and bigger than mine, it wasn't tall enough. They need a box cool enough and big enough to hold a time machine. So he said he'd have to go to the thrift shops, and then he left. And then my daughter and her friends came home, and I didn't get to bed until 10pm, so I slept in this morning (on purpose) too late to catch the train.

But I forgot about driving to work with a head cold. The road I take goes up a hill. A very high hill. A hill high enough that my ears do that altitude-pressure thing on the way up, but they won't fix themselves on the way back down, so I end up hearing everything muffled until I can finally get the pressure equalized.

My cold is toying with my lungs now, but it hasn't taken hold there just yet. It's making my voice deeper ("sultry" is what I like to call it), and within the next day or two, I'll be able to sing bass along with Bill Medley's part in Righteous Brothers songs. And I don't have an infection yet, either. It's a little soon for that, but I'll know if I get one, because I'll want to take my temperature. I'm calibrated for a fever. As soon as it hits 99.0, I can almost feel the cool hardness of the thermometer against the right spot under my tongue. And then I'll start to feel sorry for myself in a big way, not like now when I sort of feel sorry for myself for having a cold.

So that's the health report for today. I'll go now. I need another Kleenex.