We've all been there. Sinuses packed with cement, but the nose is still trickling. Ears clogged. Head throbbing. Hoarse as a raven. Crackling cough. The woozy, dizzy, wobbly feeling that one's head weighs a thousand brick-filled pounds. No appetite, or odd, specific cravings. Waking with the arid Sahara in the mouth. All oomph departs. We shuffle along, the walking unwell, trying to focus and survive, just counting down until our immune systems manage to kick out the offending virus.
600 years ago, the common cold, as carried by the conquistadors who landed on the Yucatan Peninsula, likely wiped out ninety percent of the indigenous population of North and Central America. Today, we still get symptoms, but only the immunocompromised are seriously threatened by a cold. For those who still get colds now and then, it can feel pretty unpleasant, just not likely to cause viral genocide.
I can empathize with people who suffer upper respiratory infections. I spent the early decades of my life fending off almost every kind of bug and illness. I had walking pneumonia five times as a lad. One time was so bad I wound up in the hospital, dehydrated and taking breathing treatments. I caught strep, ear infections (though my brother suffered those worse, and more often than I did), head colds, and chest colds, and developed allergies to dust, dogs, cats, horses, hay, grass, and leaf mold.
When I moved to NC, I soon found that, as my lungs cleared (I spent the previous decade smoking), the inundation of alien (to me) pollen, dust, spores, molds, and fungi in the air left me gasping. Within the first month after quitting cold turkey, I developed a double lung infection and had to take cough syrup laced with codeine, steroids, and antibiotics. That is when I learned officially that I am an asthmatic. Since everyone around me smoked when I was growing up, second-hand smoke likely contributed both to my asthma and my breathing problems.
When I worked in the schools, surrounded constantly by runny noses and germy little paws, I caught everything that came along. I have a memory of a case of bronchitis so bad that I started hacking around Labor Day and was just clearing my lungs of it as I put up Christmas lights on Thanksgiving weekend.
And then, as if I were injected with some odd immunity pill or vaccine, I stopped getting sick. Oh, once in a while, I get a very mild case of the sniffles, or I might get the stomach bug that is going around, but generally, I rarely get sick. Other people around me drop like snotty, phlegmmy flies, yet I remain untouched.
From July of 2011 until this essay hit the Web, I have only been “sick” with a cold three or four times. One of those times was in December. The most recent was last week.
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When one becomes immune, one gets used to not having the symptoms and then tends to forget how awful having a cold can feel. After a few years, it can be hard not to mistake immunity for genetic superiority. I mean, how hard is it to be healthy? It seems to take no effort. Everyone got COVID, but I never did. The delusions of strength gained from the Earth's yellow sun can be quite strong.
No, I'm not from Krypton. I know where my immunity came from. No one can work with elementary school kids for the better part of a decade and not be dipped into the most crawling, slimy, contagion-ridden environment in the world. Children are harbingers of disease and viral infection. When the pandemic was blasting us, the main instructions were to give one another space, don't touch one's face or anyone else's, and wash hands regularly and thoroughly. Go to an elementary school and you will see every one of those rules (and several more) not only flagrantly dismissed, but joyfully, ecstatically, lavishly broken.
Exposure to that level of epidemiological inferno is enough to make even the most ironclad immune systems clatter to the ground like Grandma's good China plates in an earthquake. It can also, in cases like mine, give one's body a list of antibodies so long that one slowly becomes like a supernova of immunity. Just let a virus or bacteria land on my skin, and white hot lasers erupt and vanquish it. All I have to do is wash my hands, and I'm good to go.
Now, I won't say that I am smug about my immune system. That would be to convey the wrong attitude. I don't think less of those around me who still suffer. Not really. I just thought people were impressed because I never get sick. However, what I thought were looks of admiration for my lack of susceptibility to colds were expressions of distaste and jealousy. It is hard not to brag about one's wellness when others are yarking up a lung all day for weeks on end. A word of advice. Don't tell your friends or family that you never get sick. It is just not the done thing.
Those glares of jealousy didn't start for me until I was working more commonly with people from the younger generations. I don't know what happened when they were small and got sick, but every tiny snuffle or ache must have been treated with the urgency of a medical emergency. One cough, sneeze, or headache, and the kids go running to Google for a diagnosis, then to the doc-in-the-box for meds.
My generation spent whole years alone outside, exposed to every kind of bacteria, germ, virus, cootie, and bug. We dutifully brought them home and got the whole family sick. I sometimes think that's why we were expected to stay clear of our folks; so they wouldn't catch what we had. All of us always had something yellow or green dripping from our mucus membranes. As I mentioned, I tended toward a Victorian level of frailness.
All the illnesses we caught doubled in intensity when adolescence flooded us with exuberant hormones. Stinky, pimply teens necking in the hallway were literal walking vectors, passing communicable diseases from host to host as the romantic impulses rose and fell with the hormonal tides. I remember at least two epidemics of mononucleosis where whole grades were leveled by the kissing bug and they canceled school.
Yet, we prevailed. We clung to life, like snotty-nosed special forces operators. Our parents sent us to school even when we were sick. My mother invited kids over to play when I got chicken pox. If I was sick on Tuesday, I was back in school on Wednesday, sinuses draining, coughing my damned head off, but so were the other kids. We learned to keep going even when we were worn and cadaverous by whatever ailment was “going around”.
By comparison to our parents’ phlegmatic reaction to our arresting lack of health, my younger colleagues and friends fold like cheap beach chairs at the first sign of sinus pressure or a runny nose. I once had a coworker who had the uncanny ability to sense when they were likely to get sick within a fortnight and would just stay home, waiting for the onset of symptoms. For these delicate ones, anyone sneezing around them can send them into hysterics. They might not be sick at all, but if there’s even a chance, they will not mess around.
While we were spooning dirt from under the porch into our mud pies and then tasting them and getting tummy aches from eating ‘the red berries’ when we were kids, these children were being surrounded by hypochondriacal parents. I seriously once heard a former colleague say, after they had to clear their throat, “Oh gosh. This is probably cancer.”
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Catching a cold for me is so rare that, rather than dread the symptoms, I secretly revel in them. It is a novel experience to blow several tablespoons of mucus into an overburdened tissue and then gaze in to see if there is any sign of infection. It's been so long since I have been phlegmmy or had a chest cold, that the crackling cough and the subsequent expulsion of what we used to call a Rocky Mountain oyster, feels interestingly pleasant. My colds never stick around, though some people in my town have illnesses that last for weeks, and one lady, who—and I’m not making this up—works at a local big brand pharmacy and has had the sniffles since I first moved here.
Plus, and let's face it, it can be fun to purchase over-the-counter meds. There are a whole host of nostrums, ointments, medicines, and tinctures to aid with the symptoms of a bad cold. One $30 bottle of pills promises the end of chest congestion in just two days. One zinc tablet, if taken within hours of symptoms, can end a bad cold up to five days sooner. If one has the provender to afford them, the selections are endless. I have to carefully remind myself that there is no cure for the common cold. It just has to be gotten through.
My own ailment is all but past, though I’m now convinced it wasn’t an actual cold. I foolishly mowed the grass on a dry, dusty day and filled my nose and lungs with all kinds of monsters dwelling in the chaff of previous mowings. My suffering began immediately after that and lasted several days. A mask will be essential next time. I did develop a cough, but as an asthmatic, this is fairly common with environmental allergens. Never did the expectorations from my upper respiratory system take on a sickly yellow or green tint. Anyway, I'm medicated for my asthma. I foolishly poked the hornet's nest of my reactionary immune system, causing an overproduction of histamine. I'm convinced this is what happened in December, too. If anything, these minor, piddly “colds” were from being out in nature, not from the actual rhinovirus.
Meanwhile, my younger friends treated me like I was a leper. To them, from a distance, of course, I was dying. Each cough or clearing of my throat meant that I would soon be a phantom. My suddenly raspy Kris Kristofferson-like baritone meant I wouldn't survive without 24/7 care from a trained ICU team, and even then, it would be touch-and-go. They were kind, from 20 yards away. One even asked me if my diagnosis was grim.
I don't mean to castigate them for being weenies. I mean, they really seem to care when someone gets ill, which is unusual to those of us born before the 1980s. If our parents had cared about us being sick, I would also take any accumulated sick time to rest and recuperate instead of working through whatever this was, croaking like a crow for a week. Meanwhile, I would have missed a whole week of emails, deadlines, and other things that I'm not going to let the sniffles put me behind on. If the young ones want to shudder and scamper when I sneeze, that’s on them. I’m not sure you can catch asthma, but I dig sounding like Kris Kristofferson, so I guess it all balances in the end.
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