Nothing Common About It
October 4, 2026
First comes the creepy feeling. Ominous. Nothing you can touch a finger to, just a vague sense of impending doom. You are yourself, yet not yourself. A menace stalks you.
Then it pounces. With the sniffles.
“The common cold is a surprisingly orderly little illness,” ChatGPT informs me, promising a recognizable day-by-day trajectory. The symptoms will make sense once I understand what my immune system is doing.
Already, Chat is wrong. Nothing about this feels orderly. The virus has latched on to receptors on the cells lining my respiratory tract, and it clings there, reproducing rapidly. I know this because my throat feels scorched, and though I continue bravely on with my day, it is punctuated by violent sneezes that explode without warning.
Chat coolly describes the cause as “a virus infecting the cells lining your nose, sinuses, throat, and sometimes upper airways.” The worst of the symptoms do not come from the virus, Chat adds, proceeding to blame the victim. Apparently it is my body’s own response that plagues me. The dilation of my blood vessels, the inflammatory chemicals my immune cells are pumping out, the snowflake sensitivity of my nerve endings.
I mutter to my immune system that it can chill now. It sends a literal chill, a shudder of misery. Chat does not have a body; it does not understand. Mine, meanwhile, has cleaved away from my brain–which has gone bleary, incapable of planning, analysis, abstract ideation, or figuring out where I left my slippers. The infected cells are now releasing signaling molecules called cytokines and chemokines, which means nothing to me; I only know that my nose is dripping and my head feels like an overfilled balloon. The cytokines and chemokines are alerting immune cells, sending more blood to the tissues, making blood vessels more permeable, causing mucus to gush, and activating sensory nerves to tickle me into sneezing and blowing.
I take to my bed—or rather, the guest bed downstairs, telling my husband wearily that he must save himself. In the quiet of exile, I long for laudanum. The Victorians knew how to be sick.
By Day Three, I have lost myself altogether. My body is, instead, an old factory that saboteurs are trying to shut down. Toxins flood the pipes, corroding them, building pressure at the junctions until they burst. The machinery wheezes along, an explosive series of pops disrupting at irregular intervals.
That sleep one is supposed to get? I sneeze and gag and spew watery mucus all night long. Apparently it is thin because it is largely fluid, proteins, immune substances, and secretions. A mysterious recipe that only makes me miss my usual mucus.
My head aches. On Day Four, all I can do is sleep, wake, think of all I am not getting done, and fall back into a heavy sleep again. The dog curls against me, glad to have me pinned in one immovable place for a change. He misses our walks, though, and we all miss sleeping in the same bed. The three of us are going feral, eating oddly, sleeping at odd times in separate places.
The thought of accomplishing huge projects, like emptying my overflowing basket of wadded tissues, overwhelms me. I sink back against a stack of four pillows to do what I can do most readily: feel sorry for myself. Now the blood vessels lining my nose have dilated, so the tissues are swollen and I caddot breeeedthe. So far each day’s most productive act has been to cancel everything I had planned to do the next day.
Scariest: I have no appetite. I eat anyway. The habits of pleasure do not break easily. I am desperate to console myself, an impulse heightened by all the weeping. My eyes have been plucked out, dipped in acid, coated with ground glass, and screwed back in to stream the tears of pathos down my puffy face. Chat blames “reflex stimulation of tear glands and drainage pathways.” Has Chat not eaten any Sartre? Clearly this sorrow is existential.
After gulping the obligatory fluids (which I have reinterpreted as a mix of ginger ale and orange juice), I stumble to the loo. My skin feels hot and crisp, radiant, against the cool toilet seat. Swollen with fluids and phlegm, I hide from the mirror. I am running out of consolations. I have wept over the last episode of Ted Lasso season three, read all my library books, crumpled crosswords half-done.
A child’s sense of fair play kicks in: I have done everything right, dammit. Steamed my nose, squeezed saline into one nostril and out the other until it feels like I got a noseful at the public swimming pool, drunk gallons of tea sticky with honey. Why am I not better? The dog keeps looking across the room at my abandoned sneakers, looking back at the huddle under the bedclothes, then jumping up to delicately sniff my nose. I suspect he knows more than Chat.
By the end of Day Five, the broody stormcloud of misery has moved on, and I am a body again. But I was returned to flesh a cook’s paradox, raw and stuffed at once. The very air hurts my nose. Globs of phlegm lurk in my throat, refusing to rise or sink.
At least the mucus is thickening. This excites me. Every once in a while, I blow a big gobbet into the tissue, which reminds me of the occasional clots in menstrual flow. This substantiality is oddly satisfying.
The fluid streaming from me now contains dead epithelial cells, immune cells (exhausted, no doubt, from the fight), proteins, antibodies, cellular debris, and concentrated mucus. Why it needs to concentrate, I do not know. Should it turn yellow or green in color, I am not to panic, Chat tells me. Ignore the alarming folk wisdom. Neutrophils, the white blood cells that respond to infection, contain enzymes that can tint the mucus.
I am fonder of folk wisdom, even when it alarms me. But as my mucus is clear, smy loyalties need not be tested.
Day Six. My brain is awake again, dragging my body along like a dead weight slick with nose-drip. The immune system has started to win, Chat announces. Why did it take so long to kick a goal? I now feel “less systemically sick,” I am informed, despite continuing mild symptoms, because “the amount of replicating virus is falling, while damaged cells are being repaired.”
What Chat does not know is that now my husband is sick, and it is my fault, and the house is a mess, and I have to pull myself together and get to the grocery store, and all I want to do is crawl back into the dark little cave of the guest bedroom and pull the comforter over my head. Systemically.
