Cough, Sneeze, Drip, Repeat....

Briggy and I are sick! Briggy just has a runny nose (for now)...hopefully it won't progress into anything more...but I'm pretty sick. The medicine I have doesn't work that great, and I can't even take it regularly because I'm afraid it will dry up my milk supply. I always get sick at the MOST inconvinent times---like right before and during and after Briggy's birth....and now, when I am in the process of a total cleaning spree in our house, taking out all the fall decorations....and finishing up all my "apple of my eye" baby shower details. And to make matters worse, I can't sleep. I can't sleep during the day, because Briggy is fusssssssssssssssssssssy, and I can't sleep at night...well, because I havent gone to bed before three am the past couple weeks. Anyway, I googled "How to defeat the common cold" and I came up with this funny blog entry I thought I'd share.

"The common cold is actually any of over 300 different viruses. Each one of them, like the chicken pox, can only be caught once in a lifetime."

As I've already said, I have iGoogle set up as my homepage. One of the widgets that I've placed on it is the "Gullible Info" widget. What that does is it gives out a quote every time I refresh the page. And the quote that started this post is just one of them. You should check it out when you have the time. There are really quite a few interesting things there.

But the reason that this one caught my attention is, well, because I have a cold. Not something out of the ordinary. I mean everyone has one at least once a year. And whatever you do and no matter how much you take care of yourself, you still catch one sooner or later. What intrigued me was the fact that you can only catch one form of the common cold once in a lifetime. That means your organism develops immunity to that particular form of the cold. I didn't believe that. So I decided to do a little more investigation. And what other better resource there is that the good old Wikipedia. And right from the start, I had my answer: "once one has caught one of the many cold viruses, one is immune and may never catch that particular strain again". Bummer, I was sure they got it wrong. I'm only counting the times I caught a cold. It 's possible there weren't 300 colds in my life time, but each year I catch another one? It's like I'm a "common cold magnet".

After that, I tried to find out if there are indeed that many forms of the common cold. But I don't think it was there. It's even possible that no one knows how many there are, so I assume the information is somewhat correct. Three hundred seems like a reasonable number. And then it hit me. My genius plan was set: I will catch every single form of the cold so I will be immune to the damn virus(es). So I started to do a little math, just to see how long it will take for me to become invincible.

Invincibility calculations

* if I catch one cold per year I would need more that 300 years. Since I don't plan to live that long, I deducted I would need to speed things up;
* if I manage to catch a cold about 4 times in one year, it would take me about 75 years. Awesome but I should have started a little while ago. I'm 24 already I should have caught about 96 forms of the cold so far. And I doubt it. I need to speed things up even more;
* if I can get sick about 10(ten) times in one year it would only take me about 30 years to pull this through. Since I think I managed to catch about 50 strands so far, maybe even more, I'll be somewhere in my late 40's when I will be totally immune to this horrific disease.

OK, now that I've got all those things sorted out, what's the easiest way to catch a cold? My mom always said to wear a hat and gloves when I go out. "You don't want to catch a cold", she said. If she only knew of my great plan. But apparently Wikipedia doesn't agree with my mom: "experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection". That's not so good for me. What this means is "seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others". And there you have it. The best way to catch a cold. Thank you Wikipedia. There must be some other cool informations in there, but I'm not in the mood to go into any further research. I have what I wanted.

And now, let me get on with my plan. The only thing I need to do now is put my body through a lot of temperature changes like jumping from the fridge to the oven and look around for people that have a cold and make them cough on me or rub against me. That sounds pretty easy. And I only have to do this for the next thirty years. This way I'll break once and for all the myth that says: no one is immune to the common cold.

Boy, I sure hope it will be worth it. That's a bad way to waste your life.


She actually posted this Feb. 13 2008---which was when I was in the midst of my last cold/bronchitis/pnemonia! How fun.