Cooties.

My husband is sick.

As I type this, he is curled up on the sofa under a thick blanket, a half-eaten bowl of chicken noodle soup cooling on the table beside his nearly-full (and also cooling) mug of coffee.

I know he’s really sick because Coffee is the King of The Anti-Disease. (He’s also the King of It-Didn’t-Hurt.)

He’s very good at bringing home cooties for me to nurture and incubate and ultimately collapse under, but he magically avoids contaminating his own immune system. (Bastard.)

Unlike a lot of men who suffer from “man flu” or “man cold” – which basically means they turn into big sucks and regress to age five and collapse, whining, into bed for a week – Coffee is rarely ill. When he feels under the weather, he’s usually fine a day later – two, at most. He shrugs off illnesses. He laughs in the face of the pox.

For a few days, I’ve had the sniffles and a mild sore throat – nothing to write home about. Just ‘winter’ sinking in for a bit. Coffee was feeling fine and dandy and I wasn’t the slightest bit concerned that he might get my ‘sniffles’. I mean, really.

But.. He started to feel unwell yesterday afternoon, just shortly after lunch. We had been out at a restaurant and were seated near a large glass window overlooking the street. He started to feel chilled and the chill just wouldn’t go away. By the time we got home from running errands, he was looking more than a little woogy.

We had originally planned to go out in the evening. I was feeling tired, however, and Coffee was shivering and huddling. Cancel THOSE plans.

At bedtime, he was still chilled and sniffly and not feeling terribly great.

This morning he’s not much better, but having just ingested some of the Benylin crack All-in-One he’s looking at a bit perkier. His eyes are opening fully!

The kicker, of course, is that he’ll likely feel better by tomorrow morning and I’ll be catching his newly-created hyper-cooties. Did I mention he does that? Takes the minor cooties, incubates them overnight, then expells them as hyper-potent cooties-on-speed? No? Well he does. And then he toddles off to work, healthy as a horse, leaving me a crumpled heap of used-kleenex on the floor.

Cooties just don’t play by the rules. Dammit.