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Virus Alert

It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like."
--- Jackie Mason, American comedian

This is a virus alert. This is serious. I know you get messages like this every day in your email, warning you about some new virus to watch out for, but this is the one you should finally pay attention to.

At the time I'm writing this, I'm just now beginning to recover from some sort of super cold that has laid me low for over a week. I'm convinced it's a special weaponized mutant strain of the cold virus, developed covertly at the Center for Disease Control, but accidentally released into the general populace before it could be genetically targeted to affect only those who would cut funding to the Center for Disease Control.

My son Ben caught it first, probably from the Internet... he spends more time there than I do, and I'm always after him to beef up his anti-virus program, avoid opening strange email attachments, stay away from untrustworthy sites (which is why he'll never read this), and use a hand sanitizer. He probably clicked on one of those emails with the heading "You have an e-card from a perfect stranger" and was bathed in microbes that transformed him into a hacking, sneezing, major league contributor to the Kleenex bottom line.

I tried to be cautious and avoid catching it from him. There was a moratorium on hugging (which, technically, has been in place for years, but you can never be too careful so we renewed our vows). We didn't share any food, or drink from the same cup, or breathe the same air.  We didn't even exchange glances.

I'm thinking it might have been our new toothbrush. After our last check-ups, our dentist recommended that we quit brushing our teeth by hand and start using an electric toothbrush. (He also suggested we adopt indoor plumbing, but I think he was being snide). So lately we've been using a new high-powered "sonic"  brushing mechanism. Initially, I was under the impression that the "sonic" terminology referred to a device that somehow used high-frequency sound waves to blast the plaque away from teeth, so I was disappointed when I opened the box and didn't see some raygun-type gizmo that I could use to point-and-click my way to good oral hygiene.

Instead, as explained by the quick-start user's guide--- yes, nowadays even a toothbrush has a quick-start guide--- the "sonic" imagery references the high vibrational rate achieved by the up-and-down motion of the nuclear-powered brush-head. According to the technical specifications section of the owner's manual, once the toothbrush drive reaches the necessary 1.21 gigawatts of power, the brush-head averages about a gazillion strokes-per-second, enough to vaporize bad-breath germs and small household pests. It does a great job of cleaning your teeth, but you learn quickly that if any part of the brush-head other than the bristles comes in contact with your teeth, it transforms your skull into a tuning fork.

Even when handled perfectly, though, it's like running a blender with the lid off... a fine back-spray shoots out from the behind the lips, forming a barely-visible vapor cloud consisting of whatever was in the bacterial stewpot we call a mouth. My theory is that the vapor cloud lingers long after brushing has ceased.  I probably followed Ben in the brushing order one day while the cloud was still hovering. And even though I conscientiously changed color-coded brush-heads to whatever color I guessed was mine, I was already in a hot-zone of Ben-Bugs.

At any rate, it wasn't long till I could feel my throat tightening and my lung capacity approaching that of your average hamster. Even so, I wasn't too alarmed. I've had many colds throughout my life, and although scientists tell us that every cold we catch is a different virus, mine have always followed the same schedule of symptoms: first a sore throat, followed by chest congestion and a manageable cough that clears up as the germs make their way up to my nose. Then my nose runs for about a day before clamping shut entirely. During this time, every swallow feels I'm chug-a-lugging pine cones, all my nasal cavities are inflamed, and my voice takes on the timber of a dog that's been de-barked. Then all that clears up and I'm back to normal. From start to finish: about a week.

I'm in my early late-fifties, and set in my ways. I like to think my cold-virus cycle is something I can count on, just like I know what's going to happen when I eat a 3 topping pizza where all the toppings are pepperoni. So I was a little nervous when after 3 days, the cold still seemed to have barricaded itself in my chest and throat, releasing no ransom demands and refusing to negotiate with the Nyquil I sent down.

So I decided to take this thing seriously by drinking plenty of liquids and getting plenty of rest.  The "rest" part didn't require too much discipline... my lungs were so congested that even a few steps made me feel like I was in the final leg of a 26K jog... I even had my sons set up a couple of Gator-Ade tables at strategic points on the route between my bedroom and the kitchen.

After a week, it was clear my condition had hit bottom and decided to stay there. My throat remained constricted and my lungs were full of phlegm. Phlegm is supposed to be the polite, clinical word for the disgusting stuff you hawk up from your lungs whenever you have a cold, but I notice that people still wrinkle their nose in disgust if you mention the word. I think it's because it's vaguely onomatopoeic, especially if you pronounce the "g".

At any rate, my chest was congested, but I couldn't generate the moist healthy cough that would clear both my lungs and the room. When I got into bed and assumed the fully horizontal position I'm famous for, I'd immediately begin a chronic dry cough that accomplished nothing except to keep me from falling asleep. If I sat in a recliner with my chest achieving a more diagonal angle, I'd quit coughing, but it was tough to go to sleep.

My wife Sue, who has raised two boys to adulthood (three, if you count me) is a combat veteran when it comes to fighting the cold virus, and the main weapon in her arsenal (other than copious amounts of water) is Robitussin. The Robitussin people put out a bunch of cold-fighting products that they differentiate primarily with suffixes: DM; CF; EX; ETC. I'm still not sure what Robitussin ETC does... I think it's just a chaser. I counted about 15 different products on the Robitussin web site, which also has a "relief finder" where you punch in your symptoms in order to determine which product is right for you. Just for fun, I fed the website my symptoms... it recommended Robitussin RIP, an industrial embalming fluid.

Sue doesn't sweat the details; she goes straight for whatever label includes the word "MAX". As soon as one of the family starts to exhibit cold symptoms, she runs down to Costco and arranges for them to park a tanker truck full of Robitussin outside of the house.

Robitussin is primarily an "expectorant", so named because people expect it to do something. In Sue's case, she expects it to jettison mucus from my body, so she started administering steady doses of the stuff at the onset of my symptoms.  But, like I said, after a week it was clear that it wasn't doing any good. I was still only averaging a couple of hours sleep a night, my lungs weren't clearing, I had a cough that made our house sound like a sea lion refuge, and the virus had apparently spread to my eyes, which were swollen and producing the kind of stuff that's supposed to come out of one's nose.

In short, this was the worst cold I had ever had. I decided I'd  better document it. So I used my laptop camera to snap a shot of myself at the nadir of my condition and compared it to a recent picture that was taken when I was healthy. The before-and-after was a testament to the devastating effects of this virus. Who would believe that a microscopic organism could transform this:

into this:

I finally decided it was time to see a doctor.

I couldn't make a same-day appointment with my regular doctor, so I had to visit the urgent-care system at my local HMO, which was fine with me. It's nothing personal against my doctor... he seemed like a nice guy when I last saw him about 15 years ago. It's just that every time I've visited him about a specific concern (sore knee; backache; exploding navel; early onset of hunchback), the consultation has always followed the same script: he tells me that whatever I have will clear up eventually; he informs me that my body-mass index is higher than my IQ and I need to lose weight; and he schedules a colonoscopy. Maybe it's just me, but I've never been able to warm up to the guy. So I've tried to avoid him.

After checking into urgent care, I staggered over to the waiting room to wait for my name to be called. There were folks already there when I arrived, but after I sat down in their midst, they all apparently remembered they had better things to do that day, so I got into see the doctor fairly quickly.

It was a short visit.  I think the doctor was doing the medical profession's version of speed-dating; populating every examination room with a patient, then popping into each room for no more than a minute to decide who's got a chronic condition that might promise a more meaningful relationship down the road. In my case, we were ships passing in the night. I described my symptoms and told him I normally don't suffer this severely from colds; he waved his stethoscope in my general direction, told me I had a virus, reminded me how old I was, and, for Sue's benefit, prescribed me something that had "tussin" in the name. He told me I'd get over it and then was gone as quickly as he had arrived, leaving only a monogrammed latex glove as evidence of his visit.

And you know what? He was right. The next day I started getting better. I started to get some more rest and my cough loosened up enough that we had to strategically place cuspidors throughout the house. Within two or three days, I was almost back to my normal 66 and two thirds percent. 

All in all, this incident has taught me some valuable lessons:
- At my age, viruses can slap me around a lot more than they used to.
- Always wait at least two weeks before seeing a doctor for anything. Exposed bones and nail gun wounds are a bit intimidating, but if you can suck it up for a couple of weeks, these things tend to take care of themselves.
- If you refuse to shave until you start feeling better, you receive more get-well cards.

I've also decided to disconnect my laptop camera.