Well… it happened.

And we’re not even a month into the new school year.

I’ve got a cold.

I mean, it’s certainly not the end of the world. I’ve had worse. But to think we’ve gotten three full weeks of school under our belts. And even saying that is a stretch, because the first week started on a Tuesday, and then we were out for Labor Day in week three.

It’s partially my own fault. I mean, I did spend a great deal of the summer all by myself. My immune system didn’t have to deal with being around other people or their potential germs or viruses. So the immune system probably wasn’t fully prepared for me to reintroduce my body to the rigors of life in an elementary school.

Because, and I cannot stress this enough, an elementary school is a veritable Petri dish of disease. I’m sure an over-enthusiastic microbiologist would be absolutely giddy to have an opportunity to study all the goings on in an elementary school.

These kids, man… One of them coughed in my face. IN MY FACE!

So I should’ve seen it coming. Actually, I did see it coming… The incubation period for this cold just took a little longer than I expected. I thought I might have beaten the odds.

Then the sore throat hit me on Tuesday afternoon. It wasn’t an unbearable sore throat. Sometimes you get that pre-cold sore throat and it feels like nothing will ever bring relief. But this wasn’t too horrible.

When I woke up yesterday, the throat was still sore. Early in my work day, the head congestion kicked in. Just some minor sinus issues. No big. Nothing a box of tissues wouldn’t help me get through.

After work, though, that’s when the freight train hit. Out of nowhere came this horrible cough. Y’all… this is the kind of cough that, if someone had been in the room with me, they’d have been taken aback. This is the kind of cough that would probably scare someone into believing something was seriously wrong with me.

I’ll admit, for a hot second, I thought there was something seriously wrong with me.

Really… I thought that my body was systematically shutting down. This was it. This was the end. I’m comin’ Elizabeth!

And that’s how my entire evening was last night. Coughing uncontrollably. Constantly clearing my throat when I wasn’t actually coughing. Sneezing fits here and there. A surprisingly stealthy runny nose (meaning that I didn’t even know my nose was leaking anything until *drip*).

This is all much more information than you need, I’m sure. But I’ve just never had a cold progress this quickly though. I mean, usually my colds stick to head congestion for several days before traveling down to the chest. This time, it was just a few hours.

This morning, I woke up and, while I don’t feel very good, I’m not 100% miserable. Usually, you have a cold, every morning you wake up in that cold is a new nightmare of not wanting to get out of bed. But I had no problem getting up this morning. I’m still coughing a bit, but it’s nowhere near the life-threatening level it seemed to be at last night. My throat is no longer sore. My nose is just a little stuffy, nothing a few tissues can’t handle throughout the day.

I’m hoping this all means that I’ll be over this thing quickly, too.

I’m gonna end on an ethical question: Would it be so wrong of me to cough in the face of the kid who initially coughed in my face?