It's just a head cold, REALLY!

Go away already!

Sorry, dear reader, I don't mean you, though it may be in your interests to keep a safe distance.

I'm talking about my cold.  As the saying goes - I have a colt in by dose and a coffin by chest.  Exceptionally annoying, because I have only recently got rid of the last one.

Of course  I categorically state that it's NOT The Flu'.  I have already written extensively about my dislike for the flippant way people with head colds always claim they have a bout of the dreaded influenza.  It makes Flu' seem like something ridiculously mild, like a paper cut or an in-growing nostril hair.
(“Oooh, I had a flu' earlier today, just before tea, but it's gone now.”) 

What I have is just a bad cold.  An annoying cold.  It's that sort of cold that makes your life a misery, then lies dormant in your system for a while, perhaps giving  you enough time to hug and kiss your family and friends, thus converting them into miserable sneezing and coughing wretches, and then returns when you least expect it. BAM!

And the sad thing is that, as bad as a cold gets, it's not serious enough.

Really. It's  not serious enough to put you on your back and have your family waiting on you hand and foot. 
It's not serious enough to cause friends and acquaintances and perhaps the chairlady of the 'Sedgefeld Bobotie Guild' to queue at your door with steamingly delicious dishes and pots of health-giving chicken soup that Mrs Ed thankfully didn't cook.
It's not serous enough to allow you to set up camp on the WMCC (World's Most Comfortable Couch) and watch your whole 17hour Bay-Watch collection whilst your family goes to school / work before coming home to make you tea and mop your forehead.

No, it's what I call a 'Debilit Cold'. In other words it's only half debilitating.

You don't want to do anything, and you don't want to do nothing.

I hate being in the 'twilight Zone' of health.  Really.  I get so grumpy  I'm like Mrs Ed woken up from hibernation with a migraine. Talking of Mrs Ed, she often thinks that having a cold affects my hearing, but that's just something I let her believe, because it's safer that way, isn't it? 

Why? Ask any man.  When you have an annoying head cold you really have to take the time to choose your answers.

For example, rushing into an answer to the simple question “How are you feeling?” can cause no end of problems.  If you answer
“Oooh, terrible!”, you will most likely be hit with
“Well it would be really silly to be going out in the cold to watch rugby at the pub, now wouldn't it? I think you should really stay home and go to bed.  Come on, up you go….”
Or worse yet:
“Ok, you need to swallow these two pills…. Done? Ok, now remember you cannot have any beer at all for the next 24 hours because the alcohol will react with the medication and you will die a sad and agonizing death.”

With this in mind the temptation is to go with the more heroic answer when hit with that question, and blurt out
“I'm absolutely fine thank you.   On top of the world!”

But then you can be pretty sure the response will  be
“I'm so glad you are feeling better, my Sweet  I hate it when you are ill, and you've got so much to catch up on! Now you can take the rubbish out, and mow the lawn, and I really feel we need to start moving furniture about, just the really heavy stuff and only for a couple of hours or so, until I realize that it was perfect the way we had it in the first place….”

Or the agonizing
“So you can come with us?  That's fantastic! We're going on a family shopping trip to George to find the MCM (Money Consuming Machine)  a Matric dress, and shoes, and I need an outfit for your niece's wedding, and there's new stock in the nurseries now, and I'd like to buy PERFECT birthday presents for 16 of my friends you don't know, not to mention the 487 hours (or until death, which ever comes first) I will want to spend browsing around that shop of absolutely no consequence or interest at all except that it gives you a rather interesting urge to chew off your own arm…….”   

So it really is a lose  lose situation, having a cold.  And of course it plays havoc with all the best plans, doesn't it?  I was once warned that even the mildest cough can render any sort of athletic activity fatal!
 
“LISTEN TO YOUR BODY!” all the top sports medical advisors say.

So, being the serious athlete that I am, when I woke up at five thirty on Saturday morning and thought Wow, wouldn't it be nice to leap out of bed and do a 20km run, and perhaps swim across the lagoon, followed by a mountain bike ride to George, over the steep, back passes of course, what happened? I had to fight off the urge, naturally-  having a cold and a tight chest made it just too dangerous, I HAD TO LISTEN TO MY BODY. 

So in a fit of depression all I could do was roll over and force myself to go back to sleep, until about 11am.. 

Even then I couldn't even help Mrs Ed make the bed, or wash the dishes   it would have been just too risky!

Don't you feel sorry for me?  Worse yet, when I spoke to my body after lunch, it said it really felt I had to relax for a while in the horizontal position, and cancel all my exciting Saturday afternoon plans to clear out the garage. This was most disappointing because the old bearded dragon had been on at me for months to sort the garage out. It has admittedly been a total mess for the last fourteen years and we do now need somewhere to park the replacement Edgemobile out of rust's way.  So, as a special treat to Mrs Ed (as I tried to explain to her)  I had set aside the afternoon and the whole of Sunday to pack everything neatly in boxes,  throw away all the old appliances, clear out all the expired paint tins and hang my tools up in alphabetical order….. really I had! 

“But now I can't do it, my love” I murmured weakly to her from the folds of my hammock “I HAVE TO LISTEN TO MY BODY.” To emphasise my point I closed  my eyes in a grimace of disappointed discomfort, and lay back, breathing heavily through my mouth.
  “Of course you do,” she smiled, dropping several pills down my throat before I could splutter an objection, “Of course you do…” she said again as she grabbed the freshly opened quart of amber nectar from the table next to me and poured it out over the flower bed, “I fully understand that you have to listen to your body,” she said as she nonchalantly pulled on the hammock rope knot, collapsing me into an aching heap on the floor.
"Tell me, what's it saying now?"
"It says it thinks you might have just broken its back..." was all I could groan.