I am battling a real creeper of a cold.
Friends and coworkers, through December, all came down with various respiratory ailments – colds and flus manifest in numerous sinus, tracheal, and esophageal symptoms with phlegmatic results.
For quite a while I was able to avoid sickness, but the day after Christmas the symptoms began. A scratchy dryness about the eyes (“You look so tired” a coworker told me last Friday), and then it moved to my nose and sinuses on Saturday.
I’ve been taking Airborne, and some new Hall’s cough drops with blueberry and Echinacea in them which are supposed to work like Airborne does, and it all seemed to fend illness off for a while. But I haven’t been really sick since – I can’t even remember – and it seems when my immune system hasn’t had a work out for a while it gets flabby.
So I missed a friend’s party this weekend and have been ministered to by Mrs. Ombud, who is, but for some sinus trouble she attributes to cold air, doing fine. She takes something called Zicam and swears this made the difference in fending off the cold her mother and I now have. While she once said the same for Airborne, I am too tired to debate the finer points.
I’m cold. It’s time to wrap myself in a blanket, and alternate between slumbering and digging through an old stack of newspapers and periodicals I’ve procrastinated on rather than read. In this minimal way at least, I can feel productive through the sniffles.
Happy New Year all, have some egg nog or champagne for me, as you ring in the new year.
OmbudsBen 
I know what you mean… it’s so hard to think straight when your head feels that way. You did amazingly well to blog this. Happy New Year, Ben.
Hey, buddy, my other Ben and I have been dealing with the same thing. I don’t want to scare you, but ours has gone on for weeks at this point. All bad things must come to an end eventually. . .
My best to you and Mrs. OBB in 2008.
Oh dear, it isn’t a Man Cold, is it? 😉
Well, as my doctor friend Ricardo once told me … if you stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids and stay warm then your cold will last a week. If you do none of those things it will last 7 days.
Since Ricardo is the head of the nuclear medicine department at the main general hospital in Seville I reckoned he might know a thing or two about this sort of thing … he even once spent a whole half hour looking at the x-rays of my cat Lua when she was diagnosed with cancer and giving me his professional opinion, bless him.
Anyhow, hope you are feeling better (and also sending my sympathy to Mrs Ombud).
I quite enjoyed my last cold – got to stay in bed with my laptop and had the perfect excuse for not going anywhere.
🙂
Back atcha, pmousse. I hope you celebrated last night.
Marianne, good to hear from you again, although I’m sorry to her you were laid up for so long.
Az., you crack me up. I’m actually reasonably self-sufficient, but it was very nice of her to drive me to and from BART to ease my commute. (Taking the ferry means driving, boating, then walking and/or taking the SF metro train. I wasn’t quite up to all that, and BART from Oakland shoots me straight to the civic center district where I work.) I put in a very deliberate, slow-moving part day on the 31st, which will make the rest of the workweek a bit easier.
Mrs. Ombud stayed up last night to usher in the new year, watching tube as she works on her handicrafts. (The epitome of multitasking: her fingers stay busy as she watches TV.)
About 8:30 pm I went upstairs to read more of a wonderful book on news and current events in the years between the world wars, I and II, called The Aspirin Age. Great stuff; wonderful to see how much our culture and mindsets have changed since the ’20s and ’30s.
Hope you all partied well.
Ha! I was in bed and purring away long before midnight … though I did end up waking up in the wee hours and chatting with some friends online till about 6am, and then back to sleep again.
You know, I think I might be turning into a cat!
Did you check out the Man Cold video? 🙂
Yes, I did, and if I ever tried anything like that, I imagine Mrs. Ombud would be ringing my bell, all right.
I’m playing it safe and medicating myself without calling on outside assistance!
I got it, too, Ben. It came on about two days ago. My youngest daughter got it first, then it hit my oldest on Dec 26. She was over it in three days, so I was thinking that by today I’d be almost fine. But it’s worse!
I’ve taken loads of Airborne, too, but to no avail. Now I’m on to Alka Seltzer Cold Plus, the PM version for night. At least I sleep. BTW, my cousin the pharmacist also recommends Zicam.
Hope you’re better. Happy 2008!
Yb, comparing pharmacological notes like this is almost fun. So far I’m on tylenol sinus allergy today, and after I finish down here, I’m going up to drink some more NyQuil at bedtime!
My mother-in-law came over earlier and informed me I’ll survive it — which might be an admission of sorts, that she passed it to me …
I’ve been having trouble keeping up lately. I hope that by the time you read this your cold had passed on.
Everyone has their own cold remedies. For me it’s Emergen-C at the beginning or to prevent, but when it’s hardcore nothing beats homemade chicken soup.
I’ve been meaning to mention that I really admire your header. The photo and beads are lovely.
Thanks, Robin, I’ll mention that to Mrs. Ombud, too. She put a lot of work into those beads, and she’ll appreciate it.
Re the cold, I’m now to the “sounds worse than it is” stage.
With 6000 students running around, when a outbreak breaks out everyone gets sick. I’m happy to know the December cold is an international phenomenon. Hope you’re feeling better.
Stevo, The thought of 12,000 hands grabbing, poking, grasping, and passing on uncountable hordes of bacteria is mildly horrifying, at the moment.
Yes, feeling better, thanks. What with the storm and getting this cold out of my system, I never brewed this weekend — but I’ll get my winter lager in yet.