Man Cold

The last few days I have been laid low by that most insiduous of fellows: the man cold.

Friday morning, I struggled to wake as I realized my phone kept ringing and I kept receiving text messages. Upon checking them, I was informed that I had overslept and missed my breakfast plans. As I struggled (mightily, by the way) to send a return apology text, and then collapsed back into my pillows, I realized there was something far worse than missing out on the spinach & feta omelet at the Inn on Coventry: I was coming down with something nasty.

Again.

Let me say this, I can count the number of times I've been sick in the last 10 years on one hand. As long as I don't count the 7 months I've lived in Cleveland, that is. Since moving here, there have been a couple mini-colds, one horrific bout with a chest cold in January, and then this weekend's nonsense.

I'm starting to think some of it might be allergy related. But as it has mostly been below freezing, that didn't make sense. So I checked with my go-to medical advice person, a grad school friend now living in Hong Kong that somehow knows a freakish amount about medicine and all the various ways our bodies can screw up. She suggested it probably is allergies, specifically dust.

As I look about my apartment, that makes sense. We are way overdue for the semi-annual sweeping of the floors. Indeed, some times I get confused that the pile of dog hair in the corner behind the television isn't actually Ellie. (Note: If this seems even remotely disgusting to you, well, it should. But the title of the blog is Cleveland Bachelor, and there are a number of very good reasons for that. Also, I guess, for why the blog title looks unlikely to change any time soon.)

I started to self-medicate a couple days before my confirmation came in, and was doing a pretty good job of alternating between Claritin in the day and Benadryl in the evening.

Except ... the first day or so I felt so crappy I didn't eat anything, and the next everything I tasted seemed like it was covered with a mountain of table salt. So by today I was as woozy as you can imagine. I took a walk down to Heck's to get a bland chicken sandwich (some ringing endorsement there, right?) and getting there and back was ridiculous.

A few hours later, though, with the exception of some belly-aching (physical and rhetorical), my head seems to have cleared. Enough so, anyway, to realize I actually suffered from a Man Allergy Attack, not a Man Cold. My bad. For those of you that don't know the reference, check out the clip below. I'm guessing all the female readers will watch it, chuckling and nodding. To be clear, I reject the entire premise of that sketch (i.e., making fun of my gender for our inability to suffer minor bouts of the sniffles), but it is pretty clever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXLHWmjA5IE