My
Super Bowl common cold adventure
by
Robert LaFrance
Although I am about as interested in
the Super Bowl as a cat is in learning how to knit, I did watch the last five
minutes of the Feb. 4 Super Bowl played in Minnesota. Could they not find
anywhere colder? How about Barrow, Alaska?
The reason I mention the game is to
hang a label on the cold I had on Super Bowl weekend. On Thursday afternoon,
Feb. 1, it struck me right between the eyes and I didn’t say a fond farewell to
that cold until three days after the Super Bowl became history.
There are many and fabulous ways to
get rid of a common cold. I had friends, relatives, enemies and a plethora of
others on the Internet tell me exactly what cures the common cold and at the
end of the day there is only one answer to the problem.
Nothing. Scientists have been
looking for a cure for hundreds of years and it has long become obvious that
nothing will get rid of the common cold except execution, which is a little
drastic.
Why is that? Because the CC is
caused by a VIRUS. Therefore antibiotics are useless but try and tell that to
Flug. The instant he gets a cold, he heads for the doctor and insists on get a
prescription for an antibiotic. Of course that cures it instantly – within a
week.
Here’s a short list of the ‘cures’
that people advocated during my Super Bowl common cold weekend: drinking cider
vinegar mixed with melted goat cheese;
several kinds of tea that had been hiding for years in the back of our
kitchen cupboard and that should have been left where they were; cough drops
including Fisherman’s Friend, Hall’s, Zinc lozenges, chaga tea, and fifty or sixty
more. Desperate to stop coughing, I tried most of them (drawing the line at
ground-up mole droppings mixed with molasses) until, after two days and still
coughing, I wasn’t sure if my name was Bob or Attila the Hun.
Finally I said to myself: “enough of
this!” And then I waited to see if those words had any effect. They didn’t. My
late brother-in-law Winston Morton had the right idea: “Don’t take any medicine
and a cold will last a week, but if you eat a lot of cough and cold remedies it
will last seven days.” I’m working on my seventh day right now and hoping that
“the Great Scorer” doesn’t come to mark against my name before it’s over.
All those who know best keep saying
that a cold sufferer should lay off alcohol, but I can’t help but try a jar of
lemonade now and then. I believe in fairness.
My dog Minnie always seems bouncy
and healthy, so I decided to try some of her canned food. Washed down with
lemon gin, it wasn’t too bad, but on the way back up it tasted a bit iffy. She
wagged her tail as this was happening, as in the old Kipling poem: “Dog is dog
and Bob is Bob and never the twain shall meet…”
Lying on the couch like a huge
uncooked Russet Burbank potato, I saw a commercial for Buckley’s liquid cough
medicine. “It tastes terrible, but it works!” It looked so convincing that I
leapt off the couch and started putting on my parka for heading uptown.
In hindsight, I probably should have
put on my pants first, but I did remember them after all, and put them on over
my parka. I would have been a strange sight under the Midnight Sun, but I
didn’t care; I was headed for cough relief. They got quite a kick out of my
attire at the pharmacy, but I did get my Buckley’s Cough Mixture. As I left the
store, several tourists took my photo, no doubt to be shown later on Facebook.
It did work – the Buckley’s relieved
my cough. Between the pharmacy and my house I downed two quarts of that stuff
and didn’t have a sign of a cough after that for two hours, mostly because I
was sleeping. When I woke up the cough was still there, so, as we speak, I am
preparing a lawsuit against Buckey’s. Cough, cough.
And by the way, Happy St.
Valentine’s Day! I wonder if he ever got colds?-end-
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