Monday evening the unpleasant familiar feeling had returned. The symptoms, (sneezing, watery eyes and runny nose) had increased enough by midnight that I knew it was back, that miserable and most frequent infectious disease known to man – acute viral rhinopharyngitis, also known as the common cold.
They seem to get worse as I get older. And I found it somewhat strange that it came upon me less than 48 hours after seeing the new Steven Soderbergh thriller “Contagion,” a movie about a pandemic (from the Greek, meaning “all people”) that begins in China when a bat drops some fruit that a pig eats before he becomes the main course in a restaurant. As that main course, he is tasted by world traveling businesswoman Gwenyth Paltrow, who is out with the boys, drinking, gambling and eating tainted pork. You have seen Gwenyth look much better than she does over the next half hour of the movie. And along her 8,000 miles home to Minneapolis, everyone and everything she touches, sneezes on or yada yadas with is pretty much doomed.
Anyway, I gave the movie a C+ at best. The whole world doesn’t die, only about 27 million, or one half of one percent. I’d take those odds most days. So as I started feeling more miserable, I thought of the bat from the movie, and his dropped fruit. It wasn’t that long ago that we had bats in our belfry, OK attic. They weren’t the size of the jungle Asian bats from the movie, but a bat is a bat. I don’t have pigs though, only squirrels. Nevertheless, the worse I began to feel the more I wondered if my bat dropped some of his food and the squirrel ate it, turning my neighborhood into Bubonic Plague Part Three.
Tuesday I felt worse, and Wednesday, still worse. By Thursday I could barely get out of bed. I looked out of my upstairs window, through my bloodshot teary eyes and spotted two squirrels frolicking below. In the 14th century, it was rats that had brought the second bubonic plague to Europe, killing one third of the country’s population. And weren’t squirrels just rats with furry tails?
I would have never left the house on Thursday but was scheduled for a real estate CE class that I just couldn’t miss. It was a long day, but I survived. The people sitting near me couldn’t have been too happy though. Friday came and I was still ill. The Sudafed was useless and I didn’t see what the crank heads saw in the stuff. Saturday, I tried to rally because I knew the Hogs would need me against Bama, and I’ll take part of the blame for giving up early in the third quarter.
Then came Sunday, and what should have been a day of rest and recuperation. But instead it was the day before my colonoscopy. Oh well, I couldn’t feel much worse, or so I believed. By Sunday night, my Gatorade cocktails had been downed and I knew, in my heart, the end was near. I fell asleep with the Colts still leading the Steelers. The Endoscopy Clinic told me to arrive at 6:30 Monday morning. I woke up at 5 a.m. and went downstairs, started to take a big drink of OJ when I remembered, just as the glass touched my lips, it was against the rules. I let Gus out and started downloading the paper when I noticed something was different. I sat there and thought a minute before realizing that I didn’t feel bad anymore. I could breathe and my head was clear and my eyes dry.
Did the colonoscopy prep purge the plague from my person? What a discovery! I looked up at the mantle above my fireplace and imagined how a Nobel Prize would look sitting there. Excited, I bounded up the stairs to tell Kathy; Gus close behind barking his way up the stairs. I found her sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked sick.
“I feel sick,” she said through a sniffle and bloodshot eyes.
“Not to worry,” I told her. “Dr. Edwards Miracle Cure is close at hand. And we even throw in a free colonoscopy!”