A Cold Is From the Cold, Or Not?

I was brought up to believe that you got a cold when you exposed yourself to the cold without wearing enough clothes. That knowledge was corrected by medical doctors after Sienna's birth. "A cold is caused by virus, not by the cold," I was told. When I requested that Sienna's shirt get tucked inside her pants, her daycare teacher looked at me and said, "Interesting, another mother told me the same thing before. She is from Afghanistan." Then she patiently repeated what the medical doctor had taught me about how one gets a cold. Being an earnest student with many years' higher education, I don't allow myself to be so naive and primitive. But how could one's perception about reality which was firmed in reality be so completely wrong?

It's part of my grandma's handed-down wisdom that "a cold arises from the feet." I still feel very uneasy when I see a mother treating her a baby's feet -- letting them dance shoeless and sockless in an air-conditioned room like his hands. I could not shake away my personal experiences when I ran a high fever with all the symptoms of a cold after the temperature suddenly dropped low in my environment.

I tried to understand maybe when you don't keep yourself warm and feel cold, your body is vulnerable to the attack of the invisible virus. In any case, there seems to be a definite correlation between a cold and being cold. Sienna got a cold yesterday. She had a runny nose and immediately turned stuffy. When I saw her at school, the sweater was in the cabby. "Did you wear your T-shirt all day long?" I aksed her. Her answer was yes. The T-shirt is loose and almost sleeveless. I said, "that's how you got a cold, Sienna. You must keep yourself warm."

It's a mystery how the knowledge about reality can be so different from reality. I would rather face the reality and forget about decency of having knowledge about it.