Giving Colds the Cold Shoulder
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 03:37PM Ahhhhh, you have a coooooold, huh?
That's what everyone asked me this week, tilting their heads in great sympathy.
But I don't know why people get all revved-up over a cold. It's not diptheria or scabies, it's just a cold. Years ago, I had a friend who would announce that she had a cold with the same level of anguish typically attributed to state funerals or murder/suicides. Since then, I have been loathe to wallow in cold-angst.
A North Carolina woman named Martha Mason died recntly. She spent 61 of her 71 years living in an 800-pound, seven-foot iron lung after being stricken with polio and paralyzed from the neck down. Now she had something to complain about. I don't know if you are familiar with an iron lung, but it's a huge, tubular device, like an MRI, that you lie in, permanently. I saw a movie when I was young that featured a little girl who was confined to an iron lung. Let me tell you, an iron lung makes an impression on you when you're a kid. Forget detention, threaten me with an iron lung and you'd get my attention back in the day... At any rate, despite her six decades in an iron lung, Ms. Mason graduated at the top of her college class and wrote an autobiography using a voice-recognition computer. God bless her soul. I bet that she never bellyached about a cold.
As for the rest of you, the next time you feel the sniffles coming on, buck-up, grab a tissue and get on with it.
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