Coughing and sneezing

Since early morning today, I have been trying to figure out whether I was a cougher or a sneezer. In all fairness I should be neither because I had recently subjected myself to a painful flu vaccine a few weeks ago, even before the weather turned. That should have given me ample immunity to tide over all kinds of influenza infections for the first couple of months, at the very least. 

But here I was, being woken up at the crack of dawn, by a fit of the most obnoxious body-wracking cough, followed with a fierce bout of sneezing. I mean, if there was a guarantee period to the resistance that a flu shot apparently supplied, I did not make it to the first trimester also. It did not make sense to me, not at all. 

However, with my head all woozy and nose blocked, I still tried to count my sneezes and coughs. At that unearthly hour, where the writers of horror stories excelled in making their characters face all sorts of evil demons, that was the best that I could do. I was a sound sleeper who could usually sleep through earthquakes and storms but when I was roused at midnight by my own coughing and sneezing, my imagination went on an immediate overdrive.

I began seeing brick shaped shadows instead of a tissue-box, and a lady in white instead of the window curtains. Incidentally, Bollywood was to blame for dressing all its female ghosts in a white flowing garment. Irrespective of the story angle, the colour code for all their fictitious ghost figures was white. Why so? I don’t know and typically they wore their long black hair loose and were filmed carrying a candle in their hands. That eerie sight was enough to scare the living daylights out of the bravest of us and I was not brave, not when I was sneezing or coughing. 

So I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and ducked my head under the quilt, but this action tickled my nostrils and I was rewarded by another monster sneeze. The throat, not to lag behind, quickly followed this up with some nasty sounding whooping coughs. The calculations in my mind went for a toss as I tried to grasp which one was getting an upper hand. Suddenly, it became very important to me to know under which category I was being placed. By now I was running a high fever and was hallucinating a bit too. The window curtain clad lady was advancing towards my tissue box at an alarming pace, balancing a lit candle with an orange flame, that was flickering in the wind. 

Coming to grips with the fear that was crippling me I attempted to include the lady to help me in my survey. Forty-nine sneezes versus fifty-one coughs, I croaked. A strange rasping sound emerged from my mouth. Trying to clear my throat resulted in another giant sneeze that almost extinguished the approaching candle-flame. 

“Whom are you talking to?” my husband asked suddenly. 

“The woman in white has turned into a man!” said the voice in my head. 

“Say something,” my spouse coaxed. 

“Fifty,” I managed to utter, and sneezed one more time. 

“What’s that?” he mumbled sleepily. 

“It’s a tie now,” I told him. 

“Which tie?” he was confused. 

“Sneezer/cougher one,” I sneezed again. 

“Go to sleep,” he stated.

“I’m a sneezer,” I exclaimed in triumph and dissolved into another fit of coughs.