The Color of a Cold

Posted on December 28, 2004 in Pulmonary

What is the color of a cold? The sputum on the tissues I use say it’s the same yellow brown as the mustard stalks that have been standing on the slopes of Dreaded Hill since two years ago. If it turns brown or green, then I must worry. I have little time for anything other than poetry: the tightness in my chest and the rain keep me indoors listening to David Helfgott playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. When I cough, it feels like flame-spawned orange for a second or two. Then I take some tylenol, put myself back into my bed and feel the wheezing in my chest, one of the many pains native there. The trachea’s a long tube leading to a forest of clouds. A healthy lung, I am told, should stretch. But today, it wheezes. I close my eyes and see that it is the indigo that precedes the silver rim of the dawn. Indigo streaked with faint cerulean scratches, interrupted like radio signals on a day of extensive sunspot activity and solar flares.

UPDATE: I officially have a bacterial infection, so I get to go on antibiotics.