Cold-Uneeze

Hebrews 12:4

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

During SAT administration, I was starting to feel a cold coming on. My Hall Proctor was sick with a cold and had hand-delivered the virus to me I surmise. My throat was getting scratchy and the sinuses started getting that feeling that they were under attack. "I must act now" I thought. All winter long, I have been able to keep the cold virus at bay. Usually, I gargle a shot of Jim Beam, known to me as Dr. Beam, and that generally supresses the incoming cold, along with my immune system in tandem. I respect the cold virus. It is a wily foe.

But, here I was in the middle of the SAT administration as the Test Supervisor. Dr. Beam nowhere in sight. I was in the Seas of the SAT and was no due back to shore for several hours. I spied some of that anti-septic ethyl alcohol hand-spray on my desk. Schools are germ factories and it is wise to spray the hands on a routine basis. I perused the label quickly and saw that it was 71% ethyl alcohol (same as Jim Beam, only higher proof--142) . I decided to spray it like Binaca and breathe in the mist. I did it once, twice, and thrice. All is well, a direct hit on the throat and nasal passages. But then, I decided to examine the additional contents more carefully at the bottom of the label. The fine print as it were. The Ethyl alcohol was at the top of the label so I got fooled into thinking that was the only or main ingredient besides water.

OK. Fine print. Distilled water. A couple of innocuous sounding ingredients. Then, an ingredient named  Isopropanol: Hmmm, sounds like isopropyl. That's not good. I looked it up on Google.  Definition - Alcohol used as antifreeze or a solvent. Then, there were instructions that if a child drank the contents of the bottle that you should contact the Poison Center. No word on what you should do if an adult like me were to breathe in the mist intentionally. "Great" I thought. I am going to go blind or into convulsive spasms as the SAT Test Supervisor.

After a few minutes, I figured I was OK. The cold threat had subsided and I had not keeled over or gone blind.

I get truly desperate when a cold is coming on. Colds are unlike the flu. A flu comes in like a fury and I feel like hell for a day or two then I usually start to mend. Colds hang around for weeks at a time for me and it waxes and wanes like the moon, with the tides of sickness going to and fro. Can't stand the slow misery of it all. Hit me with your best shot and let me double-over but don't attack me like a guerilla off-and-on.

Now, if I could only develop the same rabid hatred for sin rather than dabble with the soul-killing stuff.