Dr. Boredom
As of this writing, I am suffering from what doctors and scientists are calling the common cold. Standard symptoms for this are coughing, sneezing, soar throat, fever and a runny nose.
Though as I lay in bed typing this, the idea of ‘standard symptoms’ just doesn’t seem to cut it. Right now it feels like someone crept into my room while I was sleeping and replaced the lining in my throat with sand paper, and my nose has become leakier than a sink in a public bathroom.
Now, with winter right around the corner and the sounds of my roommates coughing and sneezing in the other rooms, it seems as good a time as any to talk about health.
Let my cold serve as an example to all of you readers out there: Don’t get sick, it sucks. But don’t just take my word for it. In a survey I did with my roommates, 2 out of 3 definitely wished they weren’t sick. The third roommate couldn’t be reached for questioning because he was shut up in his room with a fever under a rapidly growing pile of used tissues.
While this particular cold that has turned my apartment into a miserable mucus factory might be the worst thing ever, it is just one of hundreds of cases of the common cold that are reported every year.
The cold is caused by microscopic infectious agents known to scientists as “viruses” and can be contracted from another infected human during a process doctor’s call “shaking hands.” The virus can also be contracted by touching something that an infected person had previously come in contact with, such as a doorknob, keyboard, or G. I. Joe action figure.
Once in your system they, and I am using the medical term here, make you sick.
If you do find yourself the victim of a cold, there are steps that you can make to get better. Take a stroll down the medicine isle of your local grocery store and you will find hundreds of remedies and pills created by the pharmaceutical companies to make them money.
They all come with very large and important sounding sciency words like dextromethorphan, benzonatate, guaifenesin, phenylpropanolamine, and acetaminophen which do a lot of very important and sciency things like break down in to sugar and get flushed out of your system when you pee, sweat, or breathe.
If you take these products as recommended, your cold will be gone in two to three weeks: whereas if you don take these products, you cold will linger on for as long as two, or even three, weeks.
Basically, they do nothing, which is refreshing to know that all of the money that the pharmaceutical companies are making is being put to good use.
There are a few step that you can take to avoid getting sick
Stay away from children: They are basically walking germ monsters. If you were to take a special pair of germ detecting goggles and were to look at any child walking down the street it would look probably look like one giant germ. I understand that if you have kids of your own, avoiding them might pose as a problem. I suggest sending them to Australia until they are old enough to know to wash their hands after going to the bathroom.
Stop touching doorknobs: Every journal and story that I read mentioned, at least once, that cold germs can be “contracted by touch something simple, like a doorknob.” I think that we really need to step our game up in the area of doorknob technology if this is the most frequent carrier of the common cold. Until then I suggest removing every knob, handle, and door from your home and office.
And, for god sake, avoid this apartment. You have just as much of a chance of catching the cold here as you do getting buried under a mountain of used tissues.
Nick Bennett actually had snot drip onto his computer more than one time while writing this column. Focused Boredom appears every week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the Independent.
