My First Cold
“The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.” —William Osler
I had my first cold at sixty-five. Well, I still have it. I’m still coughing like Courtney Love after a night of cigarettes and heroin or one of those women who die of consumption in old movies. It’s the kind of cough that makes you check the tissue to be sure it isn’t spotted with blood. So far it has lasted a week, the cough, the congestion, the headache, the exhaustion. I find the whole thing annoying and unacceptable.
Other people get colds. I break bones. I break bones and have appendectomies and serious burns and once I had an infected molar that caused a group of New York dentists to gasp and another time I was bitten in the middle of my forehead by a brown recluse spider. My head swelled to twice its size, all the tissues puffed out like they had been inflated. I spent that Thanksgiving in the hospital while my parents babysat my five-year-old son. My mother taught him to inhale grapes and fertilize her roses, my father introduced him to a power saw. I languished in a local hospital lacking cable. The only thing to watch on television were reruns of a show called Petticoat Junction popular in the late 60s or the in-house network featuring people getting plastic surgery.
I broke my shoulder after a seventy-two mile ride when I hit a speed bump in the hotel parking lot, I broke my elbow tripping over a rock in Maui, I broke my right hand getting doored by a NYC taxi and my arm falling off the roof of my parent’s house trying out a secret escape plan. I severely broke my leg and ankle sneaking out of my mother’s house, an injury that required major surgery and no weight bearing for three months followed by years of PT. I fractured my kneecap falling over a stanchion in the parking lot of Whole Foods.
photo by Brian Matangelo
But, until a week ago, I never had a cold. Or the flu, or anything other than food poisoning. I was free of all things viral, healthy as a horse, my immune system capable of resisting epidemics that swept through schools, ocean liners and large parties. This cold has reminded me of the brutality of my childhood when we slept in an unheated attic and anytime you said you felt poorly my mother told her diphtheria story when she was given penicillin which she was allergic to, and the last rites were read to her by a priest my grandmother conveniently found. Added to this was my eldest sister’s back operation when she had scoliosis and spent months in the hospital and a year in a full body cast. Short of almost dying or requiring your spine to be straightened, your minor illness or strep throat or about to burst appendix was of little interest.
I spent seventy-two hours in hard back labor to have my child and afterwards was told by my husband that he expected both of us to die. Still, I had a baby who was refusing to breast feed and really, was it that big of a deal? After I cracked my kneecap in two outside of Whole Foods I went inside and bought raspberries and pita chips, started to drive myself home and then recognized I was in agony and went to the ER. “It’s broken,” the doctor said. “You drove yourself here?”
So the cold has caused all sorts of issues mainly connected to my rejection of it actually existing, continuing to swim Masters and refusing to take a nap. Meanwhile I am still coughing like a person who smokes two packs of unfiltered cigarettes daily. Those of us who reject the notion of illness unless it involves surgery should probably learn to lean into the notion of self care and stop walking around with wet hair in sub-zero temperatures. Maybe in another ten years.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach