The Sniffles

Rather annoyingly, I’ve spent the last week or so with a bit of a cold. A bit of a nasty cold, actually.

It followed the usual course. A tingling in the throat, followed by a full-on nasty throat, followed a couple of days later by the whole nose and sneezing thing. Then came the coughing and headache. The odd thing is that I never seem to get all the symptoms at once, almost as if the cold is evolving day by day. I’m not complaining particularly – everything at once would be even more miserable, though it would be cool if the whole thing happened all at once and therefore only lasted a couple of days rather than a whole week.

Lemsip. Yummy – but read the label!

Lemsip is the key here. Wonderful stuff. Unfortunately, rather delicious as well. The trouble is (and one of the reasons it works so well) is that it contains a gramme of Paracetamol, which means you can’t just drink it willy-nilly. I was very good and got through the entire episode with only a couple of sachets – mustn’t stress the kidneys!

I worked throughout, of course – most people at work already had it so there was no real point in staying home, regardless of how ill I was feeling. There’s another reason for not taking time off. In over nine years at this job, I’ve yet to take any sick time. The longer this lasts, the less likely I am to take a sick day – it’s become a matter of pride. I even (jokingly) remarked to a colleague – the one I blame for passing the cold on to me, in fact 🙂 – that sometimes I wish my appendix would just burst so that the pressure of sick days would be off me.

And, lo and behold, I woke up at 3am the next morning with a nasty pain in the appendix area, spreading right across the front. Psychosomatic? Maybe. Or maybe just gas. I spent the next half hour trying to convince my body I was “just joking” about the whole appendicitis thing. In any case, I was fine later on. Appendix still intact.

But be careful what you wish for!