Colds that behave like colds

You could always date your winters by the cough. A cold would arrive in November like everyone else's cold, and then everyone else would get better and you would still be coughing in January. You stopped calling it being sick. You called it your chest, the way you might call it your knee, a permanent feature you worked around. Nobody ever told you that was not normal, because by then it was normal, at least for you.

Then this year you caught something ordinary and it behaved like something ordinary. Three or four rough days, a week of tailing off, and then it was simply over. You may not have noticed at the time, because there is nothing to notice. Health is boring like that. It does not announce itself with a headline. It shows up as an absence, as a month of coughing that just does not happen, as a February you get to spend doing other things.

Here is what changed underneath. Your airways are lined with tiny moving hairs whose only job is to sweep out what does not belong. Years of smoking flattened them, so every germ that landed had an open field and no janitor. When you stopped, they stood back up and went back to work. That is why the illness now ends on schedule: your lungs are clearing themselves again instead of waiting for you to do it by force at six in the morning.

So the next time you get a small illness, do not just suffer it. Write down the day it started. Then write down the day you felt human again, and look at the gap. That number is yours now, and it is going to keep shrinking. Thank God for the unglamorous repairs, the ones happening in you while you are asleep and taking no credit. You did not have to understand any of it for it to work. You only had to stay out of the way.