How Do You Cope with a Cold?

Mara here:

I think I'm getting a cold.

I get sick easily and it generally happens when there's any kind of change in the weather. It's gotten chilly, well, as chilly as L.A. gets, and I was just traveling, so it's not surprising that my body is telling itself it's time to get sick.

I don't always interpret the signs correctly when I think I'm getting sick, meaning I don't always end up getting sick. But every time I get sick the signs are there.

So here are my signs:

—I am cold all the time
—I have trouble sleeping at night
—I sneeze more than usual
—I have a scratchy tickle in the back of my throat
—I realize there are piles of tissues following me all over the house

Ugh.

So what do I do about it?

Previously, I had all sorts of vitamins and meds I could take to prevent a cold. And they did help. They usually kept me from getting a full-blown cold. But they never seemed to actually make me healthy. They simply put off the inevitability of my getting sick. So I can delay getting sick, which is sometimes helpful.

But at some point it seems as if my body needs to go through the process of getting sick and then healing itself to truly clear the virus up.

So now, when I feel like there's a cold lurking, pretty much all I do is take some extra vitamin C and I nap during the day if I can. I make sure I stay warm and I keep a box of Kleenex with me at all times because my nose will soon become a fountain.

I don't have any tried and true methods of preventing a cold or for quickly recovering from one.

If and when I finally succumb to a cold, usually I just have to give up. I have to just revel in it. I lay in bed and feel sorry for myself and carry tissues around and talk at my family members with my snuffed up nose in a very pathetic way.

Otherwise I do the opposite and try to pretend that I'm not sick. Although this is my preferred method of dealing with getting sick, I've found that it's not particularly successful and generally makes my body force me to acknowledge that I'm sick by turning whatever I started out with into strep throat or bronchitis.

So I've learned to just give in. I've learned to politely say, "Hello cold, my old friend" and give it some space. It usually takes two weeks for the whole cold process to run its course.

The cold starts with my feeling generally run down and a ticklish throat. Then the sneezes and stuffy nose appear. At some point, all ability to regulate my body temperature disappears. Then the watery eyes. Oh those annoying watery eyes that make people think you're crying.

This is followed by a hacking cough that is rough for a few days then tapers off until it's just an annoying cough that sometimes manifests itself as a tickle so intense that my eyes water and I can't talk, breathe, or basically do anything until I drink some water or suck on a cough drop,

And I don't know where the eating-chicken-soup-when-you're-sick cliché came from, but it is my mantra when I get sick. Usually all I want to eat is chicken soup. It soothes my throat, makes me warm, and doesn't make me feel uncomfortably full. So I eat a lot of chicken soup.

Then finally after two or three weeks I wake up one morning and realize I can once again breathe through my nose and I'm no longer coughing.

And for a day it feels like a complete miracle that I am no longer sick.

This cycle for me tends to repeat itself three or four times a year. Usually once or twice a year I do end up with an infection that requires antibiotics. I am prone to strep throat and, because of my asthma, it's not uncommon for me to get bronchitis. On the rare occasion, I get a sinus infection.

But usually it's just a cold.

Toni here:

Mara's piece was a "blast from the past" for me. Why? Because, since I became chronically ill in 2001, I rarely get an acute illness. I've had two colds in the past 16 1/2 years. 

My best guess as to why this is the case (and several doctors have agreed) is that my immune system is "upregulated." It never returned to normal functioning after I got the viral infection in 2001 that triggered my illness that now goes by the name ME/CFS. By upregulated, I mean that my immune system is actively on high alert all the time. This means that, on the one hand, it's able to fend off acute illnesses, but on the other hand, it's always in a heightened state of "sickness response." 

(I have no medical training so this is a lay person's understanding based on a lot of research about how the immune system works.) When people get an acute illness, they don't realize that it isn't the actual virus or bacteria that makes them feel so sick. The sick feeling ("the sickness response") is a side-effect of the immune system going into action, for example, producing cytokine cells to fight off the offending critter. That side-effect is worth it; your immune system may be saving your life when it does this. But it's hard to bear when your immune system doesn't return to normal after the immediate threat has passed.

One infectious disease doctor I saw described this way. He walked over to the light switch in the examining room and said, "It's as if the light went on to fight the acute infection you got in 2001, but then never went off. We need a reset button for your immune system but we don't know how to do that."

I guess it's a blessing that colds and the flu pass me by, but to be honest, I'd trade feeling sick all the time (and the house-boundness it imposes on me) for those acute illnesses.

Mara and I would love to know about you? Can you tell when you feel a cold coming? Do you have tricks for recovering from a cold quickly?