Having some sort of health issue isn’t so bad. It’s not knowing when it’ll get better. (I have a sore leg.) When I was in college, I went to the health clinic for some reason or other. Impacted ears? Not sure. I can’t ever remember going to the doctor because I had a cold. When there, I read a brochure that said pretty much no matter what you do, a cold takes about one to two weeks to work through. After that, I tracked my progress. I knew that if I felt a sore throat on Thursday, I’d feel a hell of a lot better by the following Tuesday, and be done with it by the time Thursday came around again. I’d write these things down, you see. Like a scientist (measuring subjective states of being). When I was younger, a week of cold symptoms was almost always followed by a week of coughing. I think that might still happen, but I tend to get cough drops the moment the coughing phase starts. It tamps down on the issue a bit. Coughing is an interesting thing: it starts to become a habit that lasts beyond the scratchy throat that started it. Cough drops help, sure, but I suspect the real value is the mindfulness you need to stop the habit. The end result of all this was that while a cold was inconvenient and awful to suffer through, it had a recognizable life cycle. You could plan around it. My leg issue? I’ve no idea.