I felt this one coming on Tuesday night after dinner, just a touch of a sore throat that made me think ice cream, I need ice cream...
When what I should have been thinking was theraflu, I need theraflu...
It wasn't until I laid my head down on my pillow a few hours later that I recognized that sore throat for what it was, reached a trembling hand up to feel the glands at my throat, and shuddered in anticipation when I encountered bloated plums where there are usually contented little almonds.
I had to go in to work the next day and fake it as best I could, because the boss was away for the day and it was on me to play captain on the bridge. My symptoms then were still nothing more than a super sore throat and an extreme case of fuzzy-headedness. It didn't help that I had to run lots of errands that day, in the hot and humid world of sunshine and sweaty foreheads.
I went home as early as was seemly. Say, four o'clock.
I stopped on the way home for my sickbed necessities; the makings for an enormous vat of chicken soup, lemon tea, and ginger ale. I forgot to get any sort of medicine, so I had to send the man-spouse out for some later in the evening. Then I had to go out later myself because I had forgotten that day two of this particular brand of head cold includes the Night of No Sleep, as you are transitioning from a sore and scratchy throat to a thoroughly blocked upper respiratory system, otherwise known as a wicked stuffed-up nose.
So I needed a couple of bags of Ricola throat drops to make it through the night.
Thank god, last night is now last night, because it totally sucked.
Today I still have two-thirds of a vat of chicken soup in the fridge, but I decided it was time for the big guns, and made me a bowl of the Garlic Soup of Doom:
It works.
I don't make this concoction nearly as often as I used to. It involves anywhere from two to ten cloves of garlic (depending on how drastic things are), Tabasco sauce, paprika, Worcestershire sauce, a sliced up "everything" bagel, and one poached egg, and I can assure you that you smell like the least possible exciting combination of these ingredients for a couple of days after ingesting it. But desperate times call for desperate measures, as you know.
I used to make this a lot when I was still drinking, because it is such a ferocious and implacable hangover cure. Now that I am sober, I rarely have the need for its superhuman powers of detoxification. However, now that I am on the verge of my first real weekend since The Big Event, which conspicuously sucked up all my free time (and, apparently, immune system) for a while there, I am, how do you say, disinclined to let this head cold rob me of an honest-to-god weekend.
So don't come too close, because you might get sick, or worse, you might get a whiff of me.
Also, after running a large event for about a million and a half people, some of them cranky and obstreperous (most of them lovely, but they are hardly the ones who come running up to you, arms waving and jaws flapping, are they?), I am feeling more than a little misanthropic right now.
The good news is, it's raining, I am considerably less congested than I was a mere hour ago, and there is a flock of Canadian geese meandering across my yard.
