Six years ago if you had a sniffle or cough you treated it as the possible/perhaps/maybe leading edge of a communicable and potentially fatal disease. You hibernated at home, slept in the basement, wiped down the bathroom after use, while your family left you trays of food at the top of the stairs. It was with good reason: COVID was no joke. The World Health Organization officially lists over 7 million deaths from the virus, though other analyses place it at nearly triple that.
Through a combination of factors, from vaccinations to herd immunity, from masking to social distancing, not to mention the passage of time, the pandemic eventually waned even if the virus never disappeared. Today it is still circulating, though at much lower levels and in most cases with much less intensity. It can still be dangerous, especially for those with other health related issues. But if by chance you have the sniffles AND you decide that your symptoms warrant taking a test AND it comes out positive, your calculations are now very different. You likely lay low for a few days if at all, and treat it more as an inconvenience as opposed to a health emergency.
More than likely it's not even that. Our awareness of that one particular affliction doesn't mean that any of the other germs in our world disappeared, just that they've been overshadowed. They're still out there waiting to do their normal, low-level, non-life- threatening persecution of your body, complete with uncomfortable symptoms. All they do is send your Kleenex budget through the roof.
And that's the situation I found myself in. On Saturday night I felt fine, on Sunday morning not so much. It's not like I had been holed up and isolating from the world: I had been in the city on the subway, done volunteer shifts with a wide variety of people, and been out with friends to a restaurant. Any of those were ripe playgrounds to pick up the odd germ, and indeed it looked like one must have hitched a ride home with me.
My nose was stuffy, my throat had a rough spot and I felt a little punky. None of those rose to any level where I was thinking I needed medical intervention. Still, while I'm generally healthy and take reasonably good care of myself, my age alone puts me in a higher risk group. And anyone who lived through the pandemic is somewhat scarred and overly sensitized by that experience. Was this nothing? Or was it something?
Making it more confusing is the time of year. While it's glorious to see the woods fill in and the flowers bloom, the level of pollen is off the charts. Everything is coated with a light sheen of yellow dust. Even if you don't have specific allergies, it's as if a vacuum cleaner coughed. The bees might be very happy, but those of us with more sensitive respiratory systems are feeling the pain.
In either case, the result is that I had the feeling of fighting something. Thankfully there was nothing major on my schedule, so laying low was an easy option. I drank some tea, took a nap, and kept a box of tissues close at hand. I went to bed early, hoping that next morning I'd feel better.
It was not to be. I didn't feel worse, but I couldn't discern any improvement. Were it not for my pandemic experience I would be merely be annoyed. But there's that nagging remembrance and caution. So while not wanting to be alarmist, and out of respect for my wife and those I planned on having lunch with, I rifled through the closet to find a sealed but expired test. Recalling the drill, I set up the stuff, swabbed my nose, and mixed and dripped the solution onto the test strip. Fifteen minutes later, of course it's negative. What I have is your basic sniffles.
Thankfully, lunch gets cancelled having nothing to do with me. A bit more tea, another nap, and by dinner I'm honking less. The next morning I feel marginally better and can see daylight approaching. It was indeed the most common garden variety affliction you can have, and while it was an inconvenience, that's all it was. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cold is just a cold.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford wrote his very first column in 1995 about having a sore throat. He recovered. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
