The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:54am on Tuesday, 10th February, 2026:
Anecdote
This current infection I have has only reinforced my view that when I die, I'll have a cold at the time. It'll be what tips me over the edge to have a stroke or a heart attack or to fall down the stairs or whatever.
For the third night in a row, I've had to sleep on the couch downstairs so as not to keep my wife awake with my coughing. My son-in-law has had to do the same to spare my daughter from the louder effects of his misery. It might seem unfair that the ill person is the one who has to sleep uncomfortably, but my daughter has a baby who would also have to move, so I suppose it's not. There're only two of us in our house, though, so I can feel aggreieved about it.
My voice isn't back to normal, but is largely present when I try to speak now. My throat no longer hurts when I swallow. My son-in-law, on the other hand, feels as though his windpipe is being held in a Darth Vadar death pinch; the only thing he can eat is ice cream. Still, if you're going to be restricted to eating only one thing, ice cream isn't a bad one to go with.
My daughter is a pharmacist and is allowed to prescribe antibiotics for certain complaints. One of these is tonsilitis, which an investigation of her husband revealed was causing the death pinch. He's now on antibiotics to cure it. I had a tonsilectomy when I was five, so no antibiotics for me. That said, my stepmother has been prescribed some because her cold has developed into a chest infection. Mine hasn't, though, so no antibiotics for me on that score, either.
In an effort to get some sleep, I didn't take a bedtime dose of the medicine I was given for chesty coughs (which, just as it claims, gives you a chesty cough after you've taken it). I thought that perhaps if I didn't cough as often I might get some sleep. It didn't help: OK, so I didn't cough quite as often, but when I did it lasted for ages as nothing was coming up. Eventually, I took some of the bad-tasting elixir at around 6am.
What felt like two hours later, when I went to the toilet, I checked the time and it was 6am. Either: I misread my watch when I took the medicine; this lurgy has interfered with my sense of time; I've coughed so hard that relatavistic effects caused some kind of time dilation to come into play.
Having a dreadful virus is a cloud that does have some silver linings. I'm exercising coughing muscles I didn't know I had; I'm slowly losing weight; I'm doing a lot of reading, rather than writing. Hmm, actually, I'm supposed to be doing writing, so maybe that last one isn't a silver lining.
Why didn't I ever get anything like this when I was lecturing? I could have had a week off! As it was, I never took a day off sick, even though I was surrounded by students who brought germs from all over the world for me to catch (but somehow didn't). I did sometimes have to cancel individual supervisory meetings when I had a bad cold, because I could have passed my cold on in the confined space of my office, but it was never so bad that I couldn't lecture perfectly well. I did occasionally catch something from supervisees who staggered to their supervisory meeting while ill out of a misplaced sense of duty, but luckily most of them were only too keen to realise they had a legitimate (for once) excuse to miss a meeting.
Anyway, I'll see how this virus proceeds. I think I'm on the winning side now. Coughs can stick around for weeks, but so long as the magnitude of them subsides I should be OK.
Eh-hoo. Eh-hoo-eh-hoo-eh-hoo. EH-hoo-eh-hoo-eh-hoo-eh-hoo-eh-hoo.
Sorry, I'm just having flashbacks to when my grandfather got up in the morning and coughed up the sputum that had collected in his lungs overnight (a consequence of his smoking 40 cigarettes a day from age 12 onwards).
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).