Togetherness and sharing are lovely, but my partner and I have been passing a cold/flu bug back and forth for more than a month now, and I’ve about had enough of it. I brought the grot home from an early December work trip to Sault Ste Marie. The trip got complicated when my initial flight home was cancelled due to weather, and then the replacement flight was delayed for several hours, again because of bad weather. Of course, this meant I couldn’t make my train connection in Toronto and, by the time I got home to Kingston after an extremely long day of travel, I could feel the telltale signs of some kind of trouble in my throat.
Naturally, I was scheduled to head out a day later to speak at a December 6th event in Toronto.
For one of the first times in my working life – thanks to the encouragement of a colleague/friend – I cancelled that speaking engagement. Good thing, too, since by then I had developed such severe laryngitis that I could barely speak. Instead, I stayed in my pyjamas for a couple of days, sipped on ginger lemon tea (add some hot honey to make it a real cold-zapper), napped and watched trashy tv. (Tracker, season 3, if you must know. I think I might have actually lost brain cells watching it, but it was exactly what I needed at the time.)
Just as I was getting back on my feet, my partner caught the same bug but, unfortunately for him, his cold developed into pneumonia, so he was laid up for much longer than I had been.
No FOMO here
Our back-to-back colds, coming on the heels of an autumn that had me on the road much more than I had intended, gave us the opportunity to radically rethink our — well, my — usual approach to the festive season. No big family gathering. No seasonal baking — and by that I mean none at all. No decorating. No gifts. In fact, we spent December 25th at the movie theatre watching the most recent Avatar movie and eating popcorn.
In the few weeks since, we have each had that same cold (or perhaps a new one?) again. We are still both sick. We only saw one set of grandkids in the holidays. We’ve rescheduled or cancelled several social engagements. We made it to one Ottawa Charge hockey game in a brief hiatus in our ongoing illnesses (and it was a good one, in which the Charge beat the Minnesota Frost 5 – 2), but I had to miss another for which I had a ticket. We missed out on two musical shows. While we haven’t stayed up to see in the new year for a long time, I’m pretty sure our 9:00 pm bedtime on December 31 set a new early bird record. I even had to miss the first euchre night of 2026 at our condo.
My big plan to participate in a fitness class through the seniors centre went out the window when I had to miss the first two sessions because I was sick. Even my intention to start 2026 in a healthy way by re-establishing my daily indoor walking routine has been derailed, at least so far.
Night times are a cacophony of mutual coughing. No sooner does one of us stop than the other starts. The bathroom counter is lined with OTC cold medicines, which we are consuming at a rapid pace. We may be, single-handedly, keeping Fisherman’s Friend in business.
It’s kind of pathetic around our place right now, to tell you the truth.
A cocktail for our troubles
There has been an upside to all of this. I’ve slowed down – a lot. I have, finally, listened to my body, which has been trying to tell me for quite a while that I just don’t have the energy or stamina that I have taken for granted for decades.
My 2026 calendar now has one week a month blocked off during which I will not travel, go to meetings or give presentations. No more back-to-back speaking engagements in different parts of the country. I’ve decided, after resisting for years, that next fall I will get the flu vaccine because – news alert — I am not invincible.
I’ve realized that the world did not come to a stop because I didn’t make nuts and bolts or fig newtons in the holidays. (And we very much enjoyed eating other people’s festive season baking.)
I’ve read some good books; perhaps most notably at the moment, Susan Orlean’s memoir called Joyride. I’ve taken naps. I’ve sat still and done nothing.
And, thanks to a recent care package from friends that contained some freshly squeezed orange juice to which thick slices of fresh ginger had been added, I have a new cocktail. It’s quick and easy to make:
Combine 2 ounces smoked maple whiskey with 4 ounces ginger orange juice. Pour over ice. Add two cocktail cherries and an orange slice. It might not get rid of your cold or flu right away, but it will help you forget that you are sick, at least for a little while.