For the first time in a few years, I managed to catch a proper cold, and by that, I mean a cold which confined me to bed for a couple of days, mainly with an awful fever and incessant coughing. This cold all started with a runny nose, but I was uncertain as to whether it was a cold or the start of the annual hay fever season. By the second day, the symptoms were unmistakably that of a cold, and a pretty bad one, as all the symptoms associated with a bad cold manifested themselves: as well as the fever and the coughs, there were a severe headache and muscle pain.
It took me a good few days to recover, and while most of the symptoms are thankfully gone, I’m still coughing quite regularly. As I felt well enough to venture outside, I bought a bottle of cough medicine at the local pharmacy. I haven’t had cough syrups for a long time, and it’s probably one of my least favourite types of medicine, as cough syrups usually come in two forms: either they are utterly vile, or sickeningly sweet. The bottle I bought belonged to the former, but seems to be quite effective, even if it hasn’t totally silenced the coughs.
Perhaps the weirdest thing, in that I had never experienced anything similar before, about this bout of cold was that when the fever receded, it did so from one side of my body first, then the other, and there was an hour or so between the two sides. I felt the fever go away from the right-hand side of my body first, and it became less hot on the touch, and less sensitive to the minutest of temperature change. Yet, the left-hand side remained very hot, sweating profusely, and prone to chills and shaking when I moved and disturbed the air.
In any case, I hope this is going to be the only bad cold that I catch this year.