This is the hottest summer I believe I have ever gone through. Granted I am older, larger, exercise less and am inside with air-conditioning almost all the time.
However, it can’t just be my imagination. A pending vacation may have caused me to make the wrong wish.

Mary Lou and I are leaving soon on a trip to Europe. Earlier, as the heat beat down day after day, I told her I wished that the weather on our trip this summer would be cold.
Whoever is in charge of wish granting must have misunderstood and thought I said “I wish I had a summer cold.”

I am one of the lucky ones in that I very rarely get a summer cold. This one jumped on me in the space of one day. A scratchy throat one afternoon was soon more like Niagara Falls as the infamous post-nasal drip became a waterfall.

Wishing to be a tough man and sweat it out, I relied on the old homemade and over the counter remedies. NyQuil and later DayQuil, became part of my daily routine.
Combined with everyone’s suggestions about what lozenge to take and what to gargle with, I drifted into some alternate state of mind.

Why is it that medicines designed to make you better often make you feel worse? Antihistamines make me so groggy that I took a four-hour nap on Saturday. That was preceded by a one hour nap before lunch! Maybe I was trying to sleep off the cold, but that didn’t work either.

With our pending trip, the final straw came along that made me visit the doctor. My wife started nagging me. Have you been to the doctor? Do you want me to call the doctor?
What she was really saying was that I better not be sick on this long planned trip.

I quickly checked the internet to see if there was any other home remedy I had missed. Given that Google turned up 358 million hits to the phrase, “Summer Cold,” I realized it was time to punt. I did what any self-respecting husband of 37 years would do: I went to the doctor like my wife told me to.

Shots and pills seem to working their magic and it looks like I will leave the sniffles at home when we travel. After all, who wants to travel on a plane next someone blowing their nose and coughing for nine hours?

I will certainly be more specific in wishing for cold weather next summer, rather than a summer cold. After all, sometimes wishes do come true.