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Tuesday 12 December 2017

Never just 'a cold'.

How would you describe 'a cold'? The NHS website infoms me that it is "a mild viral infection of the nose, throat, sinuses and upper airways. It's very common and usually clears up on its own within a week or two." So far, so obvious.

Except the colds that we get in the Duck household often don't fit this definition. Sure, they include your basic snot and cough, but also deliver a host of other fun symptoms that seem to play out over a month or more.

Take the current 'cold' that has just swept through the family. Duckling is on antibiotics after developing a suspected secondary bacterial chest infection three weeks into an otherwise standard snotty cough, just as I thought he'd recovered. This resulted in a 40° temperature for 3 days, a tummy ache and puking incident, and a cough so incessant that I had to use his asthma inhaler round the clock just so he could go longer than 20 seconds between coughing fits. Drake was, and still is, afflicted by very painful sinuses and a snot cascade of Niagra proportions. I meanwhile had minimal snot, and no sore throat but ran a high temperature for five days along with chest issues, shivers, viral conjunctivitis in both eyes and a total loss of my sense of smell and taste for a fortnight. Excellent for the diet at least. Ducklingette was a bit snotty and had a good wheezy chest rattle going on for a week, but avoided the high temperature everyone else had. Until this evening at least... Which suggests that she's either having a relapse, she too has a bacterial infection or she's caught another cold off someone. Given that the symptoms so far are very similar to Duckling's alleged 'secondary infection', I suspect the last one. 

Nearly four weeks all this stuff has been plaguing us. A whole bloody month. I'm knackered and struggling to see any light at the end of this mucous-flooded tunnel. It's not flu - I've had flu and that is AWFUL. But nor is it "just a cold" as most people - and the NHS - would define it. It's more a Cold Plus, or a Cold 2.0 if you will. These uber colds seem to hit at least once each winter. So is this normal? Do we, as a family, just have crappy (for failing to defeat them quickly) / overly enthusiastic (for causing so many crazy symptoms) immune systems? Is it genetics (Duckling almost certainly has the Drake's dodgy lung genes)? Are we all lacking decent nutrition? Are colds evolving to be more virulent than they once were? If so, is it global warming? Or am I just massive hyperchondriac making a big song and dance about perfectly normal, if slightly drawn out illnesses? I mean, we always get better eventually, and Duckling only got hospitalised the once...

I honestly have no clear answer to any of these questions and it annoys me because when you don't know why you're spending weeks at a time being unable to smell a reeking nappy (great for me, less great for Ducklingette) there's nothing much you can do about it. At the very least, it would be good to know the exact virus we all have so I can get a better handle on what to expect in terms of symptoms, severity, duration and treatment, and an idea of what we are all now immune to. For not all cold viruses are created equal - there are over 200 of them, with more emerging all the time, each one has a slightly different profile. It would be great to blot a few off the giant cold bug bingo board.

I thus find it odd that in the modern age nobody has decided it might be helpful to be more precise, and produced a quick test that enables doctors to say (e.g.) "Ah yes, you have Human Rhinovirus C. This one last ages and is likely to cause wheezing, pneumonia and hallucinations of purple rhinos, so do watch out..."  But no such luck.  Why so vague?

Of course I know the answer - a system that identified viral species in every coughing person in the doctor's waiting room would be prohibitively expensive - I'm no biologist but I imagine it is neither a quick nor easy task, for all my wishful thinking. Beyond basic curiosity and my pedantic need for precision, there is not an awful lot of epidemiological use in tracking bugs that rarely cause much damage beyond a crusty nose either.

What would have more value, as I have argued before, would be a Viral v Bacterial test. Doctors often can't reliably diferentiate between colds - caused by viruses - and bacterial infections (though pharmacies were trialling such a thing for sore throats).  For this reason, we have on more than one occasion now had to force antibiotics down Duckling without knowing if they're strictly necessary. This week is a case in point - Ducklingette appears to have caught her new bug off Duckling (same symptoms, just less melodramatic), implying his was viral not bacterial all along. Having had an argument over every single dose of the stupid bloody banana gloop, this is a tad frustrating.

As it is, we, as parents, just have to live with the unpredictability and rely on conversations at the school / nursery gate and Facebook parenting groups to reassure us that six weeks of coughing is absolutely de rigueur for those with the current lurgy du jour.  Because even if we knew what the kids had, the solution will, nine times out of ten, be the standard coldathon drill anyway - be liberal with the cuddles, trust your instincts and try to ignore the urge to shout "really, how are we still in the middle of this?!" every ten minutes. Which is parenthood in a nutshell really, isn't it?