It’s Just a Cold

 

It started last Tuesday night.  I awoke in the wee hours coughing like a person with terminal pneumonia.  In the few hours since I had retired feeling quite normal, a painful, bronchial cough had seized my lungs.  I knew from the tickle that refused to leave my throat that I would have laryngitis the next day.

I wish I knew who the genius was who first said “it’s just a cold.”  Usually, that would precede something on the order of “I will soldier through it and drag myself to the office like the trouper I’m expected to be.”

I did that.  I practically crawled into the workplace with my tissues and cough drops, looking “pekid” and ugly, nose red and raw, thinking I was being a team player, a stand up employee.

The best part of this recent “common cold” I am battling is that I don’t have an office to go to.  And it’s a good thing, too, because this one has knocked me on my keister.  For the first time since it started last week, I was strong enough this morning to wash and blow dry my hair after a long, decongesting, hot shower.  Then I had to lie down!

A cold is probably among the most contagious diseases known to mankind, yet we have created a culture around it that minimizes  both its effects and its virulence. 

“Oh, it’s just a cold.  I feel okay except for the sneezing and the coughing and the need to breathe with my mouth open.”

There are two possible sources of this, my latest virus.  My next door neighbor and I worked together at a neighborhood after-school program.  Everybody knows that elementary school kids are walking Petrie dishes for all things contagious.  My neighbor got sick a week ahead of me, and she thinks she caught it from one of the office “saints” who came to work sick.  Either way, she missed an entire week of work, feeling guilty about it all the way.

People, we need to get a grip.  We understand how these “bugs that are going around” are distributed, so why do we cling to the notion that a cold is the one disease that doesn’t get a free pass from work?   

There is bound to be a reader of this post who will tell us the cold is contagious days before an individual feels the symptoms, so staying home after the symptoms materialize won’t keep the co-workers safe.  But that is not true.  Since the cold virus is passed from person to person either by sneeze-driven molecules in the air or by contact with a previously expelled molecule that landed on a door knob or the handle of a faucet, is stands to reason that the cold is most contagious at the peak of your symptoms.

Perfect attendance at work used to be a big deal.  Some people even received awards from their employers for never missing a day.  What they should have gotten is a reprimand if they were among the legions of troupers who went to work sick.  

Stay home.  Force liquids.  Catch up on movies, if you can hold your head up.  And just when you think you are all better…don’t.  It’s usually a brief respite, nothing more.  And there is no medicine that will make you get better faster.  Antibiotics don’t work on viruses.  Treat your symptoms with decongestants and antihistamines, lay back and take it easy.  Your co-workers will love you for it.  If they don’t, they should.