Under siege

There’s never a good time to get a cold. Rarely do you hear someone say, “Hey! You know what would be a real gas? Coughing ’tlll my throat catches fire, leaking from the nose like a broken faucet, and sneezing uncontrollably while driving on a traffic-clogged two-lane highway!” Anyone caught sputtering this nonsense is either supremely sarcastic or certifiably insane. Either way, they’d probably make for an entertaining dinner guest.

 

Yet it seems as though the common cold has a certain innate intelligence – some buried sub-animal instinct that lets it know the precise moment when it would be the most inconvenient to strike illness in its prey. Colds never assault us on lazy Sundays, when the only activities on the docket consist of slurping whipped cream from a can and watching “Golden Girls” marathons in our dinosaur jammies. Being all mucus-y may take the fun out of Rose and Dorothy’s trip to the aquarium, but at least we’re not at the office, buried to the tops of our filing cabinets in tissues and lozenge wrappers.

 

Cunning devils, these viruses. They know better than to wait for our boring stretches. They always ninja-kick our immune systems right before a big event, like a date with the cute gymnast from down the street with the knobby elbows and cockatoo-shaped birthmark on her neck. To cite a totally non-specific example.

 

I got sick way more often when I was a child, which I’m sure is a common theme among most adults. The younger we are, the less fortification our immune systems have against all manner of bacteria. Ever sit next to a sick kid in a public space or at a family gathering? It’s like sitting in the front row at a Gallagher show and being sprayed by chunks of smashed watermelon.

 

Not that it’s the child’s fault; it’s just what happens. Probably the worst instance from my own childhood came when I was about 12, as I was sucker-punched by an influenza virus that was the bacterial equivalent of a swollen-jowled baseball freak juiced on steroids. It laid me out with the kind of high fever that could power a generator. If I’d had raised lettering on my forehead, a farmer might easily have used my face to brand a cow. I was hot, is what I’m saying.

 

What made the incident even more vexing is that I was afflicted during my school’s Christmas break, which is absolutely not when a 12-year-old wants to be flattened by a bug. If a pre-teen could choose a time to be sick, it would be during a particularly challenging school week, one with a lot of algebra lessons and a history unit about the inventor of the button fly. But that was never my luck. I’d be mule-level robust during 99 percent of the school year, and then I’d get a week off and start hacking more violently than the Marlboro Man in a room full of burning asbestos.

 

Ah, 1993. What a year to get the flu. A popular video game for the Super Nintendo console, “Star Fox,” had just been released. I was expecting it as a gift. The game centers around a talking fox who pilots a spaceship through intergalactic landscapes littered with jacket-wearing gorillas and robots that look like centipedes. (You know, that old premise.) I had been reading about it for weeks in my nerdy fan magazines. Apparently, the game featured graphics so advanced that it was a whole new level of immersion, just a few strands of DNA removed from virtual reality. By ’93 standards, of course, this meant a bunch of crude polygons were assembled in patterns that could cause epileptic attacks in unsuspecting seizure bait.

 

I was pumped. Stoked. Frothing to play this game. Then, just a few days before I expected to board my spaceship and shoot a bunch of androids in their stupid android faces, I was leveled. Picture the worst headache you’ve ever felt, combined with the worst fever you’ve ever had, coupled with an inability to keep food down, and then throw in malaria and a stubbed toe for good measure. That was roughly the level of my incapacitated state.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time, what with family dropping by for the holiday, and the Andromeda Galaxy waiting to by saved by my awesomeness. But see, that was all part of influenza’s plan. The flu, the cold ... they know when it’s time to pounce. They’d make good military strategists, come to think of it. The U.S. Army’s next high-ranking general should be a petri dish filled with boogers.

 

A streak was recently broken. I hadn’t fallen prey to so much as the sniffles since just before Thanksgiving in 2012, when my unabashed food gorging was sullied by a nose stuffed tighter than a hit man’s car trunk. It was an impressive run. That run was obliterated last weekend by a bout of day-long sneezing which pinned me to the couch, helpless to do more than watch History Channel documentaries about the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. It was an enlightening, in a throat-clogged, kill-me-now kind of way.

 

It wasn’t a full-blown flu, but it was still a stumble over one of winter’s hidden hazards. Everyone talks about the snow, as well they should – it’s by far the season’s biggest inconvenience, and we can measure it visually, peeking out our living room windows and taking instant stock of our immediate peril. But viruses are our silent assassins. They scheme and plan and make their offensive when we’re at our most vulnerable. Here we are, an advanced species capable of boring holes in mountains and making star-shaped raisin cookies, and all it takes to render us useless are dirty doorknobs and tainted air molecules. Lame.

 

Which is why we need to mount a counteroffensive, a biological version of the Normandy invasion. General Hand Sanitizer will oversee strategic operations. Staff Sgts. Nyquil and Alka-Seltzer will hem in the enemy with a two-pronged pincer attack, and Admirals Multivitamin and Grape Juice will coordinate movement on the ground. 

 

It’s March. The enemy’s on the ropes. Now let’s deliver the decisive blow.