Head Cold

Bleh.

“This is my least favorite thing ever,” I told my husband as I tried to fight off my head cold with a tissue. “No wait,” I amended, “my least favorite thing ever is when I’m so sick I can’t even leave the bathroom. This is one of my least favorite things.”

Colds always hit you when you’re stocked up on tissues. I’ve got a good 3 boxes squirreled away, and I had been planning to use them up gradually, wiping tiny noses. But it seems like just when I have enough to last for a few months, somebody in my house gets a cold. And when one person in the house gets a cold, we all get colds.

I know there’s no way a head cold is able to hear the things I say or watch the things I do and try to make me feel worse because of it. But if there was ever a time for me to prove that were true, it would be now. My head cold took my “this is pretty bad but I can think of something worse” as a challenge.

I was up half the night trying to breathe, holding my head in my hands trying to make the pain lessen, and hoping that my daughters weren’t feeling the same way. I considered taking some pain medication, but it hurt so bad that I felt like downing some Tylenol would be the same as trying to use an umbrella to hold off a hurricane.

Eventually, I got some rest, propped up on some pillows on the couch, having one of those half-awake dreams that you can control what is happening to some extent and don’t really notice whether the things around you are part of the dream or you are actually blowing your nose for the seventeenth time.

When my husband left for work, he asked me if I wanted him to stay home. If I’d been properly awake, I would have said, “yes please,” but the conversation ended up as part of the dream I was having where I cut the extremely long line at a New York City food truck to get a fish taco for my mom.

I came out of my half-asleep haze to struggle to my feet and attempt to feed my energetic daughters breakfast. My mother offered to watch them when I texted her so that she could say, “oh, my poor baby!” to me.

When I dropped them off, my mother gave her get-rid-of-a-cold advice: “Drink! Drink!” “I was!” I whined. “Yesterday I was drinking water as though I cared about fashion and it was about to go out of style for some reason!” “Drink some more!” she commanded.

So now I have a gigantic cup of tea in front of me, and a glass of juice and another one of water within arm’s reach. I will take this head cold on, and I will win.

I just hope I don’t run out of tissues before then.