mister fidget

Last night we attended a performance by Alvin Ailey's American dance theatre at our premier local venue. I should mention that I was nursing a heavy cold at the time, doubtless contracted during my plane flight home from Palestine. That day it had kicked in with full streaming nose, sneezing and general mild discomfort. I did my best to minimise its effect on surrounding theatre goers, but after one sneezing bout a man sitting behind me tapped me quite aggressively on the shoulder and hissed:
"Do you think you could stop fidgeting? You're spoiling my enjoyment of the show"
I whispered back to him:
"I have a severe cold; I'm doing the best I can"
After the interval I noticed that he had swapped his seat with someone else, and I spent the remainder of the (highly satisfying) show wondering when I was going to receive the next tap on my shoulder, but it never came.
After the show I commented to my wife, who for her part was outraged by the incident:
"Well, I guess I finally came across someone who's even more irritable than I am"

Today is (hopefully) the peak day of my cold symptoms, though still not so bad that I felt it necessary to take time off work. A cold, as I frequently explain to my patients, is not an illness or disease, but "an acceptable deviation of health" Most humans get 3-5 "URTIs" (Upper Respiratory Tract Infections) per year and they require no treatment. Indeed, a useful working adage, and one I often trot out to the patients, goes as follows:
"If you treat a cold it lasts a week, if you don't it lasts 7 days"

In my case, however, as a life-long smoker, there is always the tendency for a cold to mature into a true chest infection, which does require intervention with antibiotics. I haven't started them yet, but I must remain watchful for the telltale signs: the production of green sputum along with the extremely unpleasant sensation of the chest "locking up". Usually ABs will solve the problem in not much more than a week, but in the pre-antibiotic era this scenario could easily have transformed into pneumonia, with death as a possibility.