Don’t Tell Me You Never Get Sick

If I have a cold (as I do now), when you tell me “I really never get sick,” I take that as an invitation to sneeze in your salad.

Come on, you know you gets colds and the flu as often as the rest of us even if you do run 10 miles a day, eat nothing but free-range organic vegan spices recommended by Dr. Oz to improve the immune system, and never go out in public without bagging your hands in Ziplocs.

What kind of weird human behavior is it to deny you ever get sick even as your nose starts to run and your voice becomes scratchier than a pubescent boy’s? I admit that I used to be this way myself, thinking I was stronger, faster, and smarter than the average virus. I hated seeing ads for commercials that promised to cut two days off a cold because that meant I had to admit I’d be sick for at least that long. But it turns out that I am human, hear me sneeze.

I’m not saying we should all milk the sniffles for all the tofu noodle soup and blankets we can get out of our friends and loved ones, but neither should we deny our own vulnerability. You can live a healthy life and take precautions (I myself have switched to fist-bumping instead of hand-shaking) and still come down with the common cold. If it wasn’t common, it would be called the “rare and unusual cold.”

So if I run into you in the cold remedy section in the drugstore, don’t try to pretend you’re just buying this stuff for a friend. The tissue hanging out of your pockets is a dead giveaway. Admitting you’re sick will make you feel better. It’s about the only thing that will.