I gawda code. Began in my sinuses. Crawled up my nose just like Conrad Black, then sat there for a couple of days growing stuffier and stuffier, as one might expect.
Eventually my cold found some 60-grit sandpaper and started work on my throat, until everything I ate proved harder to swallow than the Tea Party’s rationale for strangling America (“You’re better off dead than in red, baby”).
Then it moved into the rest of my body: aches, fever, chills, congestion like the Colwood Crawl. Next thing you know I’m on the couch hurtin’ like a country song, moaning in harmony with the dog. That’s when I began to suspect, as usual, that I had contracted something more grave than a common cold.
“I think I’m dying,” I told my wife.
“You sound all raspy, like Burgess Meredith in Rocky,” she replied. “Say something else.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “This could be the end.”
“Now say, ‘You’re a bum, Rock,’ or, ‘Women weaken legs.’ ”
“Remember when I blamed the dog for eating the last of the apple pie at Thanksgiving?” I asked her. “That was me. Also, I might have accidentally slept with a couple of your friends. Thought I should come clean before I check out.”
Now I had her attention: “You ate the apple pie?”
“Feel my forehead,” I said. “Do you think I’m about to croak?”
“Did you really eat the pie?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re about to die.”
This reassured me. Frequent readers might note that when it comes to predicting my own demise, my batting average is akin to that of Harold Camping, the California-based radio preacher who on five occasions — in 1988, 1994 and then on three dates in 2011 — convinced followers that the end of the world was nigh.
After his fifth spectacular strike-out, Camping tossed his helmet in the dugout and declared himself retired, which must have relieved/bemused/surprised those of his adherents who had quit their jobs in anticipation of the Apocalypse.
Unlike Camping, I remain in the game, having successfully died of a series of exotic infections. I succumbed to hoof-and-mouth disease during the global outbreak of 2001 (the same year I mistook Tim Hortons doughnut dust for a terrorist anthrax attack). Managed to hold my breath through Vancouver Island’s Cryptococcus neoformans scare of 2002, only to be cut down by SARS in 2003, the avian flu in 2005 and H1N1 in 2009, when jittery Victorians lined up for flu shots as though the health authority were selling rides on the last chopper out of ’Nam. On occasion I have also perished from ebola, mad cow, dengue fever, West Nile and, just to be on the safe side, East Nile.
Today, I am sorry to announce that I am about to be lost to either Middle East respiratory syndrome (the spread of which has drastically reduced the number of Muslims making a pilgrimage to Mecca this year) or the bubonic plague, which appears poised to sweep Madagascar.
For this is the way of the world: We panic out of all proportion to the actual probability of going belly up when the disease is new and sexy, but merely shrug at more likely, albeit more mundane, maladies.
The SARS outbreak of a decade ago might have killed 44 Canadians, but somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 of us die of the seasonal flu and/or pneumonia each year.
Likewise, we only respond to imminent danger, not long-term peril. It’s like global warming, where we have a hard time maintaining the appropriate level of alarm about an impending catastrophe whose approach is measured in decades, not minutes.
Same goes for heart disease. It’s not the stuffing-and-mayo sandwich that you eat today that will cause your jammer. It’s the one after that, and the one after that, and you can worry about them tomorrow. Anthrax and Middle East respiratory syndrome might not kill you, but deep-fried Mars Bars and a lack of exercise eventually will.
Cold comfort to those of us who are dying not from the next global pandemic, but from the common cold.
