Last week I had a cold. A pretty strong head cold.  And the only thing really unusual about this is that I've never had a cold before.  I'm 33 years old and I've never had a head cold.  I didn't realize that the "common cold" was really common.  Since I'd never had one, I just assumed plenty of other people hadn't had it.

As my mother, college roommate, and my wife can all tell you, because I've never had a head cold I've also never had to blow my nose. Ever.  I've had the "sniffles" before but nothing ever approaching a stuffed up nose.

My wife would watch me pathetically complain in the past when I'd have what I'd considered previously a stuffed up nose "Honey, look, if I breath in really hard in my nose, there's definitely something slightly obstructing my breathing! Can't you hear it??"

My wife listened in mute amusement as I had to figure out how to blow my nose.  Apparently this is absurd. But if you think about it, if you're 33 and never had to blow your nose, it's not as straight forward as you might think.  Blowing air just out your nose really hard. Never had to do that. Some people can curl their tongues (I can't do that either). 

So picture me in the bathroom having concluded I need to blow my nose because I'm truly all stuffed up.  And I'm coughing because I'm unsuccessfully trying to blow air through my nose but can't get it to jsut go through my nose and so the air coming through my mouth ends up making me cough.

I did eventually figure it out. And a couple days later it was over. The virus had done whatever it is it does.

I haven't gotten much sympathy about this.  Like I said, I didn't realize that most people had to blow their noses before. I thought only people with sinus problems or chronically sick people had to blow their noses. I was the normal one and other people were the sickly people.

That's not to say I don't get sick.  I had a fever in the Winter of 2001 for instance for a day.  And I had Mono when I was in 5th grade.  And I got some nasty stomach flu at Christmas of 2002 (that was awful) that everyone around me had already gotten.

But this cold thing (I didn't have a fever so it wasn't the flu) was defintiely the pits. I had to use cough medicine.  I didn't really know about off the shelf cold or flu medications until I met my wife.  I knew of asperin growing up. Not that it ever came up growing up with either my mom or myself.  I got ear aches when I was a kid too I should add.

So my review is - colds aren't fun.  I don't like them.  Hopefully it'll be another 33 years before I get another one.