Scratchy

It's a scratchy throat I'm feeling. It started with a very strange night's sleep. All night long I had to clear my throat of excess fluids. Then on the way to work, it felt a bit off. Just that little tickle in the back of my throat.
I didn't think much of it during the day until we had an assembly in the outdoor stadium nearby. One of my co-workers mentioned the foolishness of standing out in the drizzle/drips since he had had a head cold for a couple days.
Now I wasn't about to discuss the issue of being outside in the fresh air as being worse for him than being cooped up in a 20x20 room with 15 teens as he has smaller classes being a special ed. teacher and therefore a smaller room. Still, why do people still insist that you get a cold from being out in it?
What's more, it was a humid 68 degrees out this afternoon. That's not what I'd call frigid. That weather, though, is hitting Montana's eastern plains, so I'm told by a friend of a friend's posting on one of the few social sites I frequent infrequently.
Those folks who avoid outside when they have a cold are the same ones who have bottles of hand sanitizer in their environment and sneeze into their shirt arms because they don't want to spread germs. And any teacher who has seen students run around at recess during 5 degrees in January knows that they are constantly MAKING those little knuckleheads put on their coats. It's like they have ice running through their veins. By all indications - running, tackling, blocking, sliding - the cold isn't making them sick because they're the same ones you've told to put on their jackets all week and they still aren't absent. Come to think of it, you were telling them all last week, too.
So we need to think of a better name than a cold. Cold doesn't enter into it. Unless the pencil I sneezed on and let you borrow got more germy when I put it into my refrigerator. Or maybe the railings at the mall that you used were filled with liquid nitrogen to keep the bacteria activated. I think that's where water monkeys come from - the mall. Not inside railings.
So what are we going to call the scratchy throat, itchy tongue, runny mucus holes, and background headache that occur mostly during the winter when everyone is inside sharing airborne orgnisms and avoiding the low temperatures for fear of catching their death?
Should we call it non-observation disease or n.o.d? That seems to be what you feel like doing when you're in a meeting, doesn't it? Maybe pony disease would explain why you are a little hoarse.
The world is filled with new names from drug companies: Cymbalta for that pesky fear of silver on drum sets; Celebrex cures those sudden urges to rejoice spontaneously; Flonase helps something out of your nasal capacity. If they can come up with 24,000 names for the rearrangement of 20 amino acids, they certainly can come up with a new name that sounds as miserable as the uncommon viruses that we call a cold that makes us wish we could scratch that itch and itch that scratch just above our esophagus.
With all that scratching going on, you'd think it was baseball season. But that's not played in winter either, (unless you count winter ball in Puerto Rico).
"CHEW!"