By Laura Hutchinson
IS there anything more annoying that a blocked nose? If there is, I don’t know about it. I’ve been struck down with one, and I don’t like it. From the neck down, I’m in perfectly fine fighting form. From the neck up, I’m a mucus-filled mess. It only took a few minutes of getting caught in the rain, and then half-an-hour sitting on a stuffy bus surrounded by strangers breathing their germs and spreading their bacteria, for the dreaded disease to take hold.
As the day progressed, it got worse and worse. But I wasn’t overly concerned, because I had my secret weapon. The one thing I always do when I have any form of sickness: that night, I put on a pair of pyjamas, a fleecy dressing gown, and fluffy socks, and climbed into bed. You see, the secret to successfully beating an illness is to burn it out of you. And by god I was going to incinerate the life out of those nasty little germs!
This method also has the added bonuses of ensuring I fall into an incredibly deep sleep, and have the most vivid and bizarre dreams. (So vivid, in fact, that I have absolutely no idea if the doorbell actually rang this morning or I just dreamed it. Either way, there was no-one at the door and no sign that anyone had been there when I got up several minutes later.)
But alas, my failsafe plan turned out to be... well, a failure. I awoke the next morning just as stuffy as ever, and twice as sweaty. The only silver lining was the fact that it was the best night’s sleep I’d had in ages. And the fact that I could threaten to breathe my infectious illness all over my other half if he displeased me in any manner. And it worked. I arrived home later that day to a clean house and a kitchen full of lilies.
Now I’m certainly not advising that you base your relationship on a series of threats and bribes – just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you. But when you’re sick and, if you’re anything like me, a terrible patient, you have to get your kicks where you can. And if the result of that is a clean house and a hot meal on the table, then so much the better. (I accept cash, cheques and vouchers as thank-yous.) And, because I still have my blocked nose, I have a feeling that the old ‘to do’ list is about to be drastically reduced in length.
At this stage, I can feel all sympathy for me quickly diminishing, so I’ll say this: I’m not a mouth-breather. Unless I’m absolutely gasping for breath, I normally breathe through my nose. So when that particular avenue of respiration is cut off by the mucus militia, I suffer greatly. Getting through the day is challenging enough, but trying to sleep is worse. I’m no slack-jawed yokel – my mouth doesn’t voluntarily stay open. So I inevitably end up spending half my sleeping hours suffocating.
Feeling sorry for me yet? How about the fact that, after working non-stop for a week, I decided to take two days off to relax and just enjoy myself, and that’s when it struck? If that’s not enough, picture me sprawled out on the couch with a box of tissues and a bag of grapes. A sorry sight indeed.
There are a million illnesses I’d rather have. I’ll take coughing, spluttering, sneezing, headaches, hives, and nausea over a blocked nose any day. Hell, I’d even take vomiting.
But to strike me down with something that even Jordan wouldn’t want to sleep with? That’s low, universe. That’s really low. Come here ‘til I breathe all over you.