Sometime last week, Jackie got a little sick. By Friday, she was very nearly bedridden, and by Sunday, Justin was also using up entire Kleenex boxes. Jackie’s been into full coughing-aching-sneezing-stuffy-head-fever-need-some-rest mode and out sick for two days now and Justin took a laundry list of cold-fighting-tools to school today after the teacher asked him in exasperation (after his fifteenth-to-fiftieth trip to the communal tissue dispenser) why he was at school if he was too sick to stay sitting down during class. He should stay stationary today, sniffling aside.

Me? Well, I’m hanging on.

Understand, I’m not worried about catching what the J’s in my life have — I almost never pick up communicable flus and colds (though I’m not as cavalier about exposure as I used to be in high school and college), but this is the time of year that I get “the Throat Thing”.

I’ve been getting the Throat Thing every year since I was twelve. According to doctor’s records, I’m remarkably consistent — there are two separate recorded instances when I came in exactly one year, to the day, after the last time I came in for the same symptoms.

The Throat Thing is rawness, soreness, and general badness that quickly (and more quickly every year) gets into my ears and becomes a raging infection that cost me the best parts of my left ear’s hearing range when I was in my teens.

The Throat/Ear Thing: where you swallow and it feels like someone’s shoving a needle file through both of your eardrums? Yeah, that’s what I get.

I’m fighting it off. I’ve got bags of zinc lozenges in my desk drawer, and more will be going home with me tonight. I’m taking vitamins (which I never do), drinking lots of fluids, and will break out the humidifier tonight and set it up in the bedroom, because breathing dry air all night inflames my throat, which is the start of it all.

(In Colorado, you see, we have to go to some effort to make a room muggy. Especially in winter, when I can light up a dark room with the static jumping off my head when I pull off an old cotton t-shirt.)

This is the first week of honestly winterish weather we’ve had all year (and don’t believe that I don’t think about how warm it’s been this year and shudder). Snow? We’ve finally got it, and it’s actually sort of cold out. I’ve got stocking caps in the truck and gloves in my pocket — when Justin started coughing last night, I made him work on his homework in another room — nothing personal, I just can’t afford to get sick right now.

And I can feel that Throat Thing trying to get in.