For years I tended to only catch a couple colds each winter, but the last several years I’ve been coming down with more.

I know when my husband’s job changed to combine both running around in a cold warehouse and interacting with random members of the public a lot that the number of colds he started catching went way up. But I think the workplace I moved to in 2008 contributes, as well. At my previous employer, most of us had our own offices. My current employer has a more typical arrangement of a small number of employees with offices, and the rest of us in a sea of cubicles. Even though most cold viruses are passed by hand-to-hand contact (and indirect hand-to-hand contact), some increased exposure happens with people more densely packed in.

Based on some anecdotal evidence of how what seems to be the same cold passed through their family, this one’s incubation time would make my most likely point of catching it at the Seahawks game I attended last weekend.

Regardless…

I’ve had colds that were so severe that over-the-counter cold medication barely put a dent in my misery. I’ve had colds that were only worse than a moderately bad hay fever day occasionally. I’ve had colds where I could get through most of the day without taking anything, and only needed to take something at bed time so I could sleep through the night. I’ve sometimes gotten sinus infections or bronchitis as an opportunistic infection on top of a cold, requiring antibiotics and prescription strength cough syrup.

This cold has been a little weird. It took me a day and a half before I found a combination of over-the-counter drugs that made the sinus headache, scratchy eyes, and general muzziness of the brain recede to a point that I could actually put several sentences together and not feel like growling and snarling at everything.

If you’re curious, what’s working is 1 Excedrin Tension Headache tablet, one real pseudoephedrine tablet (decongestant), one chlorpheniramine tablet (antihistamine). So that’s 500 mg of acetaminophin (Tylenol), 65 mg of caffeine, and 10 mg each of the decongestant and antihistamine. A typical generic cold tablet has about 325mg of acetaminophen and 5 or 10 of chlorpheniramine or a similar antihistamine, but usually has phenylephrine instead of the pseudofed. The phenylephrine has been substituted because pseudofed can be easily converted the methamphetamine. Despite the fact no studies haven’t shown phenylephrine to be nearly as effective for most people. But I digress. The typical cold tablet dosage is two tablets for an adult, so my combo has me taking less acetominophen, and a comparable does of the decongestant and antihistamine.

I don’t know if the caffeine in the tension headache tablets is why my combination is working better than the generics I was trying, or if it’s because I’m using real pseudofed.

In either case, I have noticed one really weird phenomenon. Usually, if the cold medication makes a significant dent in my symptoms, what usually happens is that about an hour or two before I would be scheduled to take the next dose following the label instructions, my symptoms start to very slowly get worse. Depending on how bad the cold is, that can mean that I’m feeling fully miserable right about the time I should take the next dose, and for about a half hour after I take the next pills, and the symptoms then slowly fade back.

This one has been doing a very strange thing. Meds kick in, symptoms drop to merely annoying. five and a half hours later, as if a switch is flipped somewhere in my body, the symptoms jump to immediately being awful. My slightly sore sinuses suddenly become throbbing centers of pain. I can feel the nasal passages closing back up. It’s bizarre.

I check the time and see it’s a little early to take the next dose, so I tough it out until it’s been six hours, and then I run and take the pills and just wait for the pain to subside… which takes about 45 minutes.

I have no idea why my body is reacting this way.

I’m thinking of digging out the pill splitter and taking only half of the pseudofed this next time, then a few hours later the other half. See if I can get one of the substances on a different schedule than the others, so things even out.

Wish me luck.