Curing the common cold

It hath been many moons since I was last the home of verminous viral wossnames of the coryzal sort, so I'm taking the opportunity to indulge in all sorts of unhealthy but comforting things. Hot toddies! Ichiban ramen with an egg beaten in! Enormous bowls of pho aslosh with sriracha! Oh I am making the most out of this cold. Pretty soon I'll install a bell that will be always on a small table beside my comfy chair, and then the fun will really begin.

For the entertainment of the fragile invalid, medical authorities recommend that reading materials of an undemanding but uplifting nature be applied. The acid in Dorothy Parker being deleterious to the soft tissues during the early stages of the patient's infection, far to be preferred is the humor of a Don Marquis, liberally applied before and after the patient ingests another snort of consolatory tipple. The poor creature is sick, after all. Now where is that blasted bell?

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall…but we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us…we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored and disorderly old age.

(In the meantime, of course, you understand you can’t have us pinched and deported for our yearnings.)

[ETA: Iiiinteresting: Eating a meal appears to stimulate the body's production of gamma interferon, which cues the immune system to attack cells that have been invaded by pathogens, such as the cold virus. Fasting, OTOH, appears to increase the body's levels of interleukin-4, which attacks extracellular pathogens, such as bacteria. "Feed a cold, starve a fever" may then be further proof that preindustrial observational medicine got it right sometimes. How perfectly fascinatin'.]