Cold Comfort

There's no comfort in being cold. Even less in having one.  I understood that first hand when I caught one recently. My first in over twenty years!  The dis-comfort of chills and coughs, aches and pains, sniffles and fever came crashing down. 

That night, as I gathered up warm blankets and boxes of tissues for a healing sleep, I decided to take a look in our medicine cabinet.  Turns out it was a walk down memory lane.  All the cold remedies in the closet were seriously past their use-by-date. 

There was Ny-Quil and ZZZZ-quil.  Sleep meds and nose drops.  Zy-Cam and cough drops.  Advil and  Cold-eeze. I was determined get well fast, so I cooked up a combination of those out-of-date drugs that no cold could possibly withstand.

Sleep came easily.  Most likely too easily.  And much too deeply.  At 3:00 a.m. I woke, wondering where I was. I tentatively put a toe out and found the Mister.  That was comforting. Shortly after that, I heard a faint, but clear, rendition of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer coming from a place nearby.  It seemed only right to sing along.  So I did.

After Rudolph had flown off into the night with all the other reindeer, I wondered if I’d really heard that. Or if it was just my imagination?  Maybe it was enabled by too many “cold comfort” drugs?   Then it started up again.  And again, I joined in.  It was Rudolph all right, singing gently and surely from the Mister’s bedside table.

Or was it? There were no music-making thingies on his bed-sidetable, no angels singing from the rafters.  But the music was there.  It really was.  Wasn’t it?