I had a nice bout of something viral and unpleasant last October. Then I managed to catch a cold in December which lasted maybe two weeks. Then I got sick again about six weeks ago, and Partner caught it from me, and we are still both hacking and coughing like madmen.
This is a bad cold season.
At least we don’t have the flu. We were both vaccinated as soon as we could get the shots – in October, I think. These latest maladies of ours are just miserable versions of the rhinovirus, or one of its relatives.
We have lots of mucus. We cough a lot. We are generally miserable and irritable and tired. I wash out my sinuses with a neti pot every night, and (very seriously) I have not had a sinus infection since doing this. To be fair, I also use Flonase every day, which I’m sure also helps.
But Partner uses at least three times the medications I do, and he sounds much worse.
This is the way it goes: I almost always get sick first, and I bring it home, and naturally Partner catches it from me. I hate being Typhoid Mary, but that’s the way it seems to go in our family.
My office is like a TB ward. People are coughing and choking in all directions. There’s not enough hand sanitizer to go around. I hear horror stories about pneumonia and infections. Our UPS driver, a bouncy musclebound guy with a shiny shaven head, was out for ten days. “Prednisone!” he told me tremblingly. “They put me on prednisone! It was horrible! I had nightmares every night! I couldn’t even sleep, because the dreams were so bad!” (I had always assumed – incorrectly – that prednisone was a female hormone.) He was back for a few days, but now he’s out sick again. Considering that most of the time he is the mostly overpoweringly healthy person I see in a given day, this is sort of terrifying.
Ah well. It could be worse. It might be H1N1 flu, and we could all be dead.
Now pardon me. I need to gag for a while.
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