Affair with my throat

I've always wanted to be a medical anomaly and now my big day has arrived.

I am impenetrable to swine flu. My neighbours had a family-wide case and I was exposed to them during every stage of their infection. I breathed their air, I touched their surfaces.

I had heard tales of such pain and delirium - the father had given way to fever-fuelled hallucinations that his world was inhabited by large isosceles triangles and twice he believed his six- month old baby had spoken to him.

At one point I was surrounded by three of their germ-ridden children who coughed on me simultaneously at close range. It was germ warfare but I survived. I was feeling very smug. In fact, I was right in the middle of calling scientists to ask if they wanted to siphon my blood for a vaccine when it started. Having slipped the swine flu noose, my body was visited upon by the mother of all head colds.

Each sneeze was like a tiny version of The Exorcist, each position change from one end of the couch to the other felt like an aerobics class and my breathing was so congested that I got puffed out eating an ice-cream.

This cold had a week-long lead-up before it came to fruition.

First there was listlessness and apathy, followed by an argument (which I really couldn't be bothered having with myself) over whether this was out of character or not.

Then I began waking to a sore throat every morning but I put that down to possible overnight snoring.

After a week of low-level symptoms, I began to feel like I was in the first throes of a delirious secret affair with my throat. My throat was all I could think about. It was as though there was just us in the world and no-one could know how much we thought about each other. Sometimes we would invite Throaties or Strepsils to join us but mostly it was just me, my throat and I.

I began to think I might have an -itis (tonsil, laryng, or bronch) but by Monday morning it was clearly as boring as a cold.

However, this was no ordinary cold. It was the kind of cold you could ring in sick and feel no guilt. My voice was so strained it sounded like gymnasts had been pommel horsing around on my uvula.

By Tuesday, the gymnasts had moved out and it sounded like Tom Waits, Bonnie Tyler and Rod Stewart were hosting a party in my voice box.

I tucked myself up with rugs, pillows and a laptop and used all my monthly allowance of bandwidth watching online episodes of Shortland Street.

In lieu of a box of tissues, I was on a roll a day habit, going through one roll of double-ply loo paper every 24 hours. And quite frankly I was getting wanton about it, leaving little piles of screwed up toilet paper on the floor, clearing them up only when I moved from one end of the couch to the other. If my nose had been a fugitive, it was leaving so many clues to its whereabouts that it would have been caught almost immediately.

I began to search symptoms online. I had a mixture of dry, and what Doctor Internet politely refers to as "productive" coughs.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 4.19am will always be special to me because it marks the time I was returned to bi-nostril breathing and the road to recovery.