What is it about the holidays that makes them so virus-prone?*

Having just gotten over the previous attack (which apparently wasn’t the flu, but some kind of fast-moving gastrointestinal thing, according to a nurse aunt of ours), I was laid low by a nasty cold on Friday afternoon. It’s apparently something that GoddessJ’s parents had earlier in the week… to give you a clue how nasty, they nicknamed it The Plague.

But this entry isn’t about that, not directly. It’s about that wonderful product called Nyquil, and it’s supposedly-daytime sibling Dayquil. I don’t take medicines unless I absolutely have to, but yesterday evening starting around 8pm I was tortured (and I don’t use the term lightly) by a horrible earache, probably from the blocked sinuses. (I once made the mistake of returning from a business trip by plane while I had a stuffed-up head, and the pain in my ear during the landing was exactly like this, though a lot shorter-lived.) It felt like someone was jamming an ice-pick through my eardrum two or three times a second, and every few seconds would take an especially vicious plunge as well. It was bad enough that I couldn’t have safely driven to the pharmacy if my life had depended on it, and GoddessJ doesn’t drive.

I dealt with it as best I could for several hours, but finally admitted defeat and asked GoddessJ to look through our medicine cabinet for something to relieve it. She found a single dose of Dayquil gel-caps. At that point I would happily have swallowed them even if they had inch-long spikes poking out if it would have stopped the pain in my ear, so I downed them — and fifteen minutes later, the pain was gone. We immediately drove to a twenty-four hour pharmacy (it was past midnight by then) to pick up a batch of them, in case it returned, or GoddessJ caught it. So far neither has happened, knock on wood.

On the way home, I found myself yawning up a storm. I made a comment to GoddessJ that I thought Dayquil wasn’t supposed to have that kind of effect. Her reply was that both Nyquil and Dayquil should be cheerfully subtitled “don’t make any f’ing plans.”**

In any case, I slept like a rock all night long. I still have other symptoms, including a sore throat that feels like it stretches to my knees every time I swallow, but I can handle those.

Now to deal with some of the stuff that I’d planned to do this weekend.

NOTES:

• I know all the arguments about people spending time in closed-up houses during the winter, and meeting so many others in a short time over the holidays. It was a rhetorical question.

** GoddessJ informed me, after I’d written this entry, that that was a Dennis Leary quote.