The small viral victories

The air in Arizona was dry and the Grand Canyon train full of screaming little germ bombs, so it wasn't surprising that my visiting mother-in-law picked up what turned out to be the household's epic — cold of 2009. My wife got it and just as I flexed my biceps thinking what a stud I was for avoiding illness in a house seemingly wall-to-wall with hacking patients, my Spidey sense started tingling.

You have Spidey sense too — the feeling in your nose that's alarmingly like a squirming arachnid that foretells impending viral doom. Sometimes at this point, a quick visit to the gym can save you, but it's a depressingly small window to hit. Epic colds are stopped by nothing of course, so all you're left to do is to gather your Vicks about you and wait.

Apart from their frequency, it's the inevitability of a cold's run that's depressing. You can do what you like — vitamin C, echinacea, zinc, elves coated in honey mustard, cane toads … It doesn't matter, because once that nasal spider is installed, you're going to get the whole show. All 4, 8 or 14 days of it.

Mixed blessing

Being the last in the house to fall like a fly meant that I had the mixed blessing of knowing exactly what I was in for. This also made me a little competitive: "So how were you on day four? Was it this bad? Did you cough this much? Did you have a fever? I don't remember you having a fever, but I have one."

And since I had got the third generation — in a very general sense — of the virus we were nurturing under our roof, so I sometimes convinced myself I'd been infected by only the hardiest and most, well … virulent of this strain.

I knew I was clutching though. I couldn't get away from the nagging feeling that I was the weakest of the three. "So I have a temperature, but you had the headaches. Which would you have chosen, the fever or the headaches? The fever, really? Good."

After a second or two. "But given that I'm coughing a little harder than you were, would you still think ... okay, okay, I'll shut up now."

And then the calculations started. For me, just as with my online (but not imaginary, I swear) cycling friends, any illness or injury becomes a count of the number of days off the bike, followed by predictions of when it is safe to get on. The thing is, a week off the bike results in a loss of maybe three times that. It'll take about a week to get back to a shaky normal and another two weeks to build up to where you had left off and continue building from there.

So the feeling of being an invalid is magnified. It is not just enough to be back on one's feet. No, recovery only counts when you are well enough to wheel that bicycle out and do an easy 20 kilometres. The precise moment this happens is contentious. My wife said it should be two weeks after my last day of fever. I say that two days is plenty, thank you.

Two colds, back-to-back

She shrugs in a steely manner and says: "When you're ill again, don't come running to me." The trouble is, she knows I will. Looking at her resignation, I sometimes think she'd rather have two colds back-to-back than have to deal with just one of mine.

Anyway, enough of that. Today was almost completely without fever and let's get back on the saddle by tomorrow.

I promise not to let you know how it turns out.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.