The Good Thing About Colds

I returned from Maine with a cold coming on. Oh, drat! I thought. It seems that the last few months since Christmas have been spent treating and recovering from one minor physical distress after another. But a cold is a cold, so I doctored myself with Airborne®, the “Effervescent Health Formula” (according to the label) “Created By A Second Grade Teacher” who was tired of catching her students’ communicable diseases. And, I sent David to Walgreens to pick up bottles of Dayquil® and Nyquil®.

On Saturday and Sunday nights, I slept a good six hours deeply without waking once. On Monday, I dragged myself into the office, but came home early. On Tuesday, I decided to bow to the inevitable and stayed home, napping in the morning, then reading on the couch in the living room where David made a fire for me in the fireplace.

I finished reading 1969: The Year Everything Changed by Rob Kirkpatrick. I labored through our book club book (deadline: this coming Sunday) titled, My Name Is Red by Orhan Pomuk, a modern Turkish author writing a murder mystery set in the 16th Century Ottoman Empire and dealing with the narrow world of the court miniaturist artists. (It was a good book to read on a sick day because it required one’s full attention.) I finished off the small pile of magazines that I hadn’t had time to read, waded through Richard D. Wolff’s Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism and finished the final chapters of Christopher Hitchen’s Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, which I have been reading off and on throughout the year since he died.

I did make my dentist’s appointment Tuesday afternoon. Feeling badly that my cold was four days fresh, I apologized to the hygienist, “I thought about cancelling my appointment.” “Oh, no,” she said. “We have all these little kids through here.” Indeed, I could see several wiping their noses even as we spoke.

“In fact,” said the dentist, coming in and shaking my hand, which I instructed him to wash, thinking of all the tissues I had been using (one was even now tucked under my thigh as I was stretched prone on the examining chair). “I think we protect ourselves from bacteria and viruses too much. The first year I was in practice, I caught everything. After that year, I have just been healthy. Getting sick is often the way the body strengthens the immune system.”

So he examined and cleaned my teeth. We commented on the new technology. He scanned my mouth and tongue and gums with a blue light ray to determine that I had no cancer. He came up with a treatment plan for the dental work I needed in the days ahead and somehow the two of us started exchanging humorous comments and started laughing so much that the gals at the desk gathered in the hall to see what was going on in the examining room.

So this is what is good about colds:

You have an excuse to come home early from work.

You can take a morning nap.

You sleep well at night due to the decongestant and antihistamine syrup you swigged at 9 o’clock in the evening.

You can read through all those piles of books that you have neglected.

You can cancel on evening meetings.

You can go to see the dentist anyway and he won’t catch your germs because he’s developed dental antibodies.

You discover that your new dentist has a sense of humor.

Your husband will bring you a bowl of popcorn in the afternoon when you have gone to bed.

You can enjoy one of the last fires of the season in the fireplace.

You have time to thank God for the good life you have lived and the many graces that are experienced in each day, day after day, day after day, even when you have a cold.
I spy God!