The Last Word On Nothing

I’m writing this to be the voice of all the people who have had this winter’s ratty cold and have not written blog posts about it.   I’ve had it twice now, so aside from worrying about what that says about my fundamentals, I feel qualified to testify.  I testified once before here but this time I’m serious.

Day 1:  Scratchy sore throat, I had this three months ago, I am instantly on guard.  I take no chances. I decline an invitation to come over for drinks. I take a pre-emptive antihistamine,

Day 2:  Scratchier sore throat, possible increase in fatigue.  I would decline drinks again but receive no invitations. I take another pre-emptive antihistamine, add an anti-inflammatory nasal spray, sleep badly.

Day 3:  Continued as before, wondering whether a cold that takes this long to kick in means I’m beating it or it’s going to be a bitch.  I bundle up and go the farmers’ market for the week’s food.  Sleep interrupted by coughing and nose blowing.

Day 4.  Scratchy sore throat turns vicious, coughing painful.  A cold virus, I think. I remember my husband telling me about a long-ago relative whose doctor told her she had a virus and viruses can’t be cured, so she went home, told her family she had an incurable virus, and took to her bed for seven years.  I think the story was true.  

Day 5:  Swallowing feels like knives in my throat.  I sit on the couch under a fuzzy blanket, humidifier going.  Antihistamines now accompannied by NSAIDs, nasal spray regimine changes to the real thing, antihistamines.  Reflect that, in spite of the antihistamines, the histamines are still winning.  Reflect further that I don’t know what histamines are. 

I google. All I can figure out is what I think is happening: Somewhere around a week ago, a rhinovirus and all its friends got up my nose, where they latched on to epithelial cells which became all alarmed and disrupted and leaky and broadcast immune system signals which resulted in everything getting inflamed.  Somehow the result of all this was poison mucus (I’m flatout making up the poison) (but surely something has to be irritating the hell out of everything, maybe that’s the histamines?). Somehow the inflaming mucal process moved into my sinuses (“Gwaltney et al reported that the intranasal pressure created by nose blowing, sneezing, and coughing is great enough to propel nasal secretions into the sinuses.”) (Lord, have mercy). And then the secretions moved gravitationally back out my nose and down my throat and into my bronchiae and lungs.  The reason for coughing seems intuitively obvious (Bronchiae: “Get it outa here and now!”) but apparently is not:  “Unfortunately, the mechanism of infectious cough brought on by . . . human rhinovirus, during colds, remains elusive despite the extensive work that has been undertaken.”  I still don’t know what histamines are but I no longer care.

Day 6:  Alarmed by the throat knives getting worse, and by Cassie’s social media post that her sore throat turned out to be not viral but strep, and by the Capital Weather Gang getting torqued up about a snowstorm followed by extreme cold (meaning that the usual Baltimore approach to snow, letting it melt, won’t work), I go to the ER.  The ER is kind but bored: not strep, not the flu, here’s some nice anti-coughing meds and a nice over-the-counter palliative, go home and take plenty of fluid.  The ER adds the word “acute” to the diagnosis of “upper respiratory infection” which makes me feel important until I remember that to doctors, “acute” means only “not chronic.” The ER says in parting that the cold is about to get better on its own.  I go home to my couch, surrounded now by cups of honeyed tea, pharmaceuticals, and used kleenex. 

Day 6:  The snow turned out to be slight and the sun strong enough that the usual Baltimore snow removal strategy is indeed working.  Under the influence of pharmaceuticals, I’ve had 10 hours of sleep.  Knives drastically dulled, coughing decreased, far fewer kleenexes.  Sunlight is pouring through the windows and puddling up on the floor.  It’s all I can do to not lie down in one of those puddles, but my stern midwestern breeding disallows such indulgence and I’m back on the couch, watching the sun outline the clouds of humidifier vapor and backlight the tips of the used kleenex. I’m about to be cured, I think. 

Then I think what that doctor should have told my husband’s relative:  doctors can’t cure viruses, but bodies can.  That’s not quite true about doctors any more: antivirals are excellent against hepatitis, herpes, HIV.  But the common-cold is caused by a rhinovirus, and less frequently by a list of evil-sounding viruses, a couple of which are only recently discovered, and all of which cause similar symptoms, can occasionally get serious, and are cured only by bodies. 

Day 7:  I’m still on my couch, throat nearly normal, still hacking, tire easily.  But I’m getting cured! I have an incurable virus but my body is curing it! 

Day 8: I figure out what this post is really about: not just whining about the common cold, but the enormous number of things, physical and mental, that break in the body that the body can’t fix.  I’m not listing them because we all know them already, these things for which no medical or psychological measures work. But when the body doesn’t even need the doctors and scientists and therapists, when it just goes about doing what it knows how to do, its little cells and enzymes and proteins trudging dutifully through their routines, and WHAM! curing happens, then honest to God, I turn my face gratefully to the glow of a miracle.

Photo: simpleinsomnia  slightly cropped, via Flickr