Do Colds Get Sick Days?

I hate having a cold. A cold is such a boring and trivial illness. If I came down with leprosy or malaria I would feel justified about having a few days off. I also would feel no hesitation about demanding sympathy from my friends and relatives. Having a cold is annoying because while you're undoubtedly ill, you're not that ill. Even while you're suffering the symptoms there is the underlying realisation that things could be worse. Unless they are very lucky everybody has suffered something worse in their life. As a result the poor old cold barely gets acknowledged as a disease at all.

I can't help feeling sorry for the cold. There it is, criss crossing the world working its little ribonucleic butt off to infect all and sundry and what is the result? Irritation at worst. There are no UN health warnings, no quarantine, no stockpiling of vaccines. All in all we treat the arrival of a cold with little more than an exasperated yawn (punctuated by an occasional cough of course). We give the cold the same kind of welcome we give to annoying but fundamentally harmless relatives. "Oh all right, come in then if you must but keep your feet off the furniture." Even the name is an insult, nothing sexy like tuberculosis or interesting and difficult to pronounce like creutzfeld-jakob disease. No; "the common cold" is all it gets. How dull, how plebeian. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

One can imagine the scene in whatever drinking hole diseases frequent (all of them I suspect), there's a cute little bacillus drinking by herself at the bar. The cold is working up the courage to make his move when creutzfeld-jakob swaggers in, buys the bar a round and leans back, lord of all he surveys. You just know that bacillus is going home with him tonight while, ignored in a corner, the poor old cold is weeping into his beer. Sometimes I wonder if the cold is even really trying. You can imagine it there with a checklist, "OK cough; check, runny nose; check, headache; check, right let's move on, I've got another twenty of these to do before knock off time.

Even on those rare occasions when somebody does get really sick does the cold get the credit? No, after the cold puts in all the spadework pneumonia swoops in and takes all the credit while the cold drifts back to obscurity. I have to admit though, I've had pneumonia a couple of times and it is way more interesting than a cold.