Why the Common Cold Always Leaves You Cold

So, you’re sitting down on the couch, looking miserable. You end up with a box of tissues and a thermometer in your mouth because some person you hate decided to incapacitate you for a week with something that everyone hates – the common cold. Even if your body temperature is 37.3°C (99.1°F), that’s not a stay-in-bed fever. It tells you that you’re warm enough to feel like garbage while doing your taxes. I’ll tell you why it can be cold BS.

Why is it called “common”? That makes it sound like a mild inconvenience, like a flickering lightbulb from a noisy neighbor. It’s not common – it’s biological hijacking. We’ve sent people to the moon, we’ve had rovers on Mars, and we have cars that can drive themselves into ditches. But if a microscopic strand of RNA decides to move into your nasal cavity, you’re done and out of commission. Your entire existence is reduced to a pile of damp tissues and a bottle of cherry-flavored syrup that tastes like a chemical plant that exploded in a candy factory.

Let me talk about the symptoms. It’s not just one thing. When things begin, your throat feels like you swallowed a handful of rusty thumbtacks. Every time you try to swallow something or your own saliva which is needed to live, it’s a reminder that your body is failing you. After that, your nose becomes runny like a human faucet. You go through a whole forest’s worth of paper products in an hour. Then your nose gets clogged – one nostril becomes sealed completely shut while the other works at 10% capacity. You try to sleep, and you have to flip over like a rotisserie chicken just to get the gravity to shift the mucus to the other side. Lastly, you won’t be able to think. You’ll stare at the wall for twenty minutes, wondering if you turned the stove off or even own a stove.

But wait, it gets better. Your muscles will begin to ache like you’re getting a thousand cramps. Same thing goes for your head, as if somebody hit you in the head with a sledgehammer punch. What’s even worse is your hearing will also get pitched because all of the mucus is blocking the eustachian tubes. You also can’t speak because your voice will be hoarse from enflamed vocal cords. You would begin a normal day, and then halfway through, your body decides to quit on you by running out of energy like it blew through a bottle of water quickly. Even if warm weather is in your favor, the heat resists your body by making you chilly! And if you want to get into the more advanced stuff, common colds can even cause death by means of giving you pneumonia. Yeah, it will cause your lungs to fill with fluid, making you feel like you’re drowning.

What are your options to get rid of it? Nothing but waiting. Your doctor tells you to get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids. You never think of sleeping and drinking water. Every doctor who went to medical school for eight years learned no groundbreaking secret to get out of colds quickly. The pharmacy aisle is full of lies and false advertising. Even if things are marketed as “non-drowsy”, you’ll end up vibrating in a different dimension for six hours after taking them. “Nighttime relief” claims it will knock you unconscious, but you’ll wake up at 3AM feeling like your tongue is made of cardboard.

It always happens at the worst time. You don’t get a cold when you have a week of nothing to do, but no. You get it the day before you begin a big trip, or right when you have a massive deadline. It’s like the virus is checking your Google Calendar, waiting for the busiest day to strike. It’s always spread by little kids who know little or nothing about hygiene, or people who keep repeatedly coughing just to bring your blood to a boil. It’s a primitive, ancient nuisance that we just accept as part of life. We’ve mastered the atom, but why can’t we stop the sneeze?

This virus is all screwed up. The smartest thing to do is force people to go back to COVID safety protocols and make them wear masks.