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title: "Why it's worth avoiding as many viruses/common colds as possible: mine led to permanent disability"
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    feature: header_ambulance.png
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People are obsessed with the short-term effects of Covid, prioritising them over the longer-term impacts. "It was just like a minor cold, really", they say, perhaps not realising that [even mild cases of Covid have been shown to cause lasting cognitive impairment](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/236034/lasting-brain-impacts-severe-covid-19-equivalent/). But I also take exception with this comparison to the common cold. Because, for me, a simple cold led to lifelong disability and severe chronic health problems.

In December of 2005, I went away with my girlfriend and a group of friends. I very quickly developed a stinking cold and felt quite rotten. Nonetheless, I signed up for a bike ride with one of the friends. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. Suddenly, on a hill climb, my joints were on fire and I couldn't keep up. I was absolutely exhausted. I felt seriously unwell, was cold-sweating horribly, and had to be collected by the other friends.

The cold persisted through January and February, never really clearing up. But what did happen was that my immune system decided to take action. However, it misfired. Instead of attacking the virus, my immunity targeted my joints, as it had done on the bike ride, triggering persistent flu-like symptoms and incredibly sore joints, to the point where I couldn't dress myself, shower, or walk without a stick. The misdirected immune response to the cold triggered permanent and severe rheumatoid arthritis that now requires constant immunosuppression to control. This has led to the need for a hip replacement this year and, without the drugs, I am completely bedridden and very, very unwell.

That's not the end of my woes with the common cold, though. In 2016, I developed another cold that just wouldn't shift. In particular, this cold, which transitioned into a secondary pneumonia, caused me to cough horrendously. Indeed, the coughing was so bad that I dissected both of my carotid arteries and had a full-blown stroke. This, in turn, led to sensio-neural hearing loss. Again, I went from the common cold, to a stroke that destroyed my proper hearing. That seems quite a serious consequence.

In 2018, I had another bout of cold to pneumonia transition. This time, I developed sepsis and nearly died in hospital.

Finally, as a result of all this, I take immunosuppressives to control the rheumatoid arthritis. This led, in 2022, to the reactivation of a virus in my body called BK virus, that has completely destroyed my kidneys so that I now require haemodialysis 5 days per week, every week, for the rest of my life. From a cold, to rheumatoid arthritis, to treatment, to kidney failure.

What I am saying is: "the common cold" can have very serious consequences and you won't know them until they happen to you. I somehow wish that more people knew or understood that these "mild" viruses can still have devastating lifelong consequences. All it takes is for your immune system to go wrong... or for you to pick up a bacterial secondary while you are weakened with the cold.

But instead, nobody takes care to avoid these "mild" illnesses and we treat them as just a part of life; minor bad luck and unavoidable. Except, as my case shows, I think, it's only ever a roll of the die away from being _major_ bad luck. Sure, the die is loaded so that most people get away with it. But this is why I remain incredibly cautious of spaces where I might contract even a common cold and mask up when near anybody or when inside. It's not paranoia; it's that I have already suffered the dire outcomes of a bad roll. Indeed, the common cold and its consequences have ripped apart my life. But I see so many people who are so happy to roll the die.