The Cold

I got back from my lovely trip, and other than confirming that next time one pair of shoes would do, not six, and that the luggage security police have no sense of proportion, all was well.

Except that the very next afternoon, a big scratchy throat rose up in me and threatened that I might be getting a cold. And yes, the scratchy throat led to more big scratchy throat, and the runny nose, and the coughing, and the spacey head, and the generalized misery—yes indeed, it was a cold. Five blasting sneezes in a row. Wracking coughs tearing up my windpipes.

This was an unwelcome development, first because who wants a cold, and second because I was bringing my son home with me the next day to do his initial recovery from hip replacement surgery. He got a new hip that day; I got a new cold.

I made some paltry efforts not to give him the cold, but now he has the cold too.

But this is the worst cold I have ever had. After six days of this miserable situation, last night when I went to bed it became hideously painful to swallow. And once you have it where it is like knives slicing your throat, you can't stop needing to swallow. Could I not just let saliva dribble out of my mouth so I didn't need to swallow? What if I sat up in bed? Was that any better? Not really. What if I lay on my side? Was that any better? Not really.

Every time I had one of these swallows, I was thinking this can't be right, or normal. This knife-slicing thing must be illegal, or certainly a clear sign that this isn't "just a cold." And you know those stories about people with cancer—if they had only got treatment earlier. This did not feel like a cold; this felt like some terminal, god-awful disease, coincidentally sliding into me at the same time as the cold, parasited on.

After a horrible spell of being awakened every hour by the knife-throat thing, I decided on a course of action. It being July 1, my doctor's office would be closed for Canada Day. I would take myself and my world-class, high-end medical emergency to the hospital and get "early treatment."

By now, at 3:30 a.m., the streets of downtown Chilliwack were virtually deserted, and astonishingly, there was no one but me in the emergency room.

The two initial medical attendants, both of whom I presume chose the caring profession consciously, treated me with unsmiling disinterest. They took my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature from behind their protective glass, not having to get up. They didn't tell me the numbers. Then I was told to go and sit and wait.

All through this, I felt slightly guilty, as one always does when one goes to emergency with anything less than a leg hacked off.

Another bit of entertainment had taken place earlier in the night. I started in on a wave of cough-and-pee episodes. I was there in bed, in my pyjamas, trying to deal with the knife-throat swallowing, when I had to cough, and the cough was accompanied by a small pee.

So I got up, yanked off the pajama bottoms, and flung them in the corner, then yanked off the top because what good is half a pair of pyjamas? I flung that on top of the bottoms.

While I was delicately standing on one foot, putting on a pair of clean underpants with a little pad to catch any further drips, I coughed and peed onto that—before I even had them on!

So I flung that aside, got out another clean pair of underpants and a new little drip-catching pad, and got these on without incident, I think.

Of course now I have peed in the bed. Not a lot, but enough that the sheets, at least, will have to be changed. It is the middle of the night, I am sick, and not at my most housewifely responsible, so I decide I will just put a small mattress pad down on top of the sheet and crawl in anyway.

My poor old bedroom is now festooned with things flung on the floor, peed-up clothing, wads of Kleenex from all the nose-blowing, and the general hideous, unsanitary detritus of being sick, plus stuff I have been too tired, sick, or lazy to tidy up. Every cough and sneeze has been accompanied by a festival of incontinence.

It was a while after that, wrenched awake again by the nasty throat pain, that I decided to go to emergency.

I was triaged in-- because by now more people had come into emergency—not completely at the bottom, but just before a young lad with a nasty sore on his leg. I was just an 81-year-old lady with a cold.

The doctor was extremely nice. Since I don't have a fever and do have a cough and runny nose, apparently it is unlikely I have strep throat. He did a swab of a suspicious spot in the throat—yowzer, that hurt—and "over-treated" me with a prescription for penicillin and a pill with cortisone to ease the horribly sore throat.

It is probably just a virus, but just in case it's not, the antibiotic can go right to work.

I came home and slept another two hours.

When I went to my usual grocery store pharmacy to fill the prescription, I found the pharmacy section was closed for Canada Day. While in the grocery store, I found myself uncharacteristically cranky. I had a short grocery list because, although my son and I are sick, we are well able to sit up and take nourishment, and there is always something I need.

There were people insouciantly hogging the aisles, blocking me with their carts, taking their sweet time, pondering labels through their bi-focals. I felt like giving someone's cart a vicious slam with my cart, but I didn't, knowing it is just a cold symptom, this misanthropic urge.

My son has been a champion through this. He has been using an old Miracle-Gro Shake 'N Feed fertilizer container for his "relief container" and has managed to use the regular toilet after certain adventures with the Red Cross commode.

At one point I put a raised toilet seat on the regular toilet, but I put the arm thingies on backward, dinting inward instead of outward, and after he gave the thing a dry run, at my nagging, and got up from the toilet, the raised seat and handles were firmly hugging him and got up too.

Anyway, his recovery is going very well. Either he is having a less horrible version of this cold, or he is a braver, better person than I am.

I eventually found a pharmacy that was open. I am to go and pick up the pills in half an hour.

There are some rules of life: the hot water heater will burst on Christmas Eve, the oven will stop working when the turkey is half done, and you will need to see the doctor when the doctor's office is closed.

Meantime, I have washed the pyjamas, the sheets, the underpants, and sundry other bits and pieces that have been laid waste by ordinary living. We may not be perfectly clean around here, but we are clean enough. Sufficient unto the day.

Wash your hands after you read this. I feel horribly contagious.