The mother of all colds….

  ….or is it the flu?

   Blimey, what an ordeal I’ve been having. One of the problems with mixing with lots and lots of strange people every day is that you catch, sooner or later, just about every horrible disease doing the rounds. Eventually, you develop the immune system of an incredibly healthy ox but in the short term, you spend a few months constantly ill. I found this out the first time I taught in secondary school, in fact most student teachers will probably tell you the same!

  It started about three weeks ago with general tiredness and unusually achey legs. I spend a lot of time on my feet at work but I was coming home virtually crippled. Then it started….

• Horrendous cough, so bad that it actually made my lungs hurt. A day or two after this, I began to feel like I was permanently drowning – I could barely get my breath my lungs were so full of crap. Three days of hardcore garlic therapy followed (ie a couple of raw bulbs a day) in order to thwart any potential bacterial infection. I was a bit ‘pungent’ for a while…
• The fluid eventually subsided and left my with a hacking cough which kept me awake for nights.
• Then came the migraine type headaches...
• Then came the weird ‘broken fingers’ & ‘dislocating joints’ phase. This was bloody strange – it felt like my fingers and toes had no ligaments or bones in them, in fact I was convinced I’d bent them the wrong way on several occasions but I clearly hadn’t.
• Sharp pain in the groin – lymph nodes?
• Nose dribbling and snotting like you would not believe. Even had the classic ‘greenies’!

• Then a couple of weeks of constipation reversed itself in quite spectacular style!
• I slowly returned to normal but the final phase of the virus appears to be a strange series of headaches. It sort of starts in your wisdom teeth and spreads up into your temples. It’s so annoying it makes you feel like you want to dash into the shed, grab a set of pliers and yank your teeth out. I found that a cocktail of 2 x paracetamol, 2 x nurofen & 2 x aspirin takes the edge off it. Every day, the mysterious head / toothache moves forwards. This morning it’s sort of in my incisors / sinuses. Hopefully it has now run out of places to go and should be gone tomorrow!

  I was quite lucky as a child because I never had colds and sniffles, I just got swollen lymph nodes in my groin (which saw me admitted to hospital a couple of times with suspected appendicitis!) but was pretty much asymptomatic. I got my first cold at about 14 years old!

  The last time I was this ill was about 1992 when I was travelling. I got some weird thing in Athens which left me in a delirious state for three days but vanished as quickly as it came. Never found out what that was.

  I’m wondering if it’s because I missed my flu jab this winter. I’ve had it for the last few years – it makes you wonder whether, by not getting ill, my immune system has gone a bit soft. Dunno. Anyway, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger etc etc’.

  Dying to get out and ride my bike. Worked sooo hard to get my bodyweight down to 11 ½ stone but now I’ve turned to lard again! I’ll try and aim for a steady ride on Sunday. Fingers crossed…