I have written about healthcare and the healthcare industry for more than 15 years now. In that time, I have interviewed some of the highest of the high muckety-mucks in the industry. I interviewed Donald Berwick, now the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, when he was with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. I have asked questions of the guru of hospital medicine, Bob Wachter, on more than one occasion. I regularly interview medical directors of large hospitals and have sat at the table with some of the world’s best oncologists. I often have in-depth conversations with the geritarician you wish your grandmother was seeing and the pediatrician every parent dreams of. And in a shout out to family medicine, I have talked with doctors who are stellar practitioners for both grandparents and grandchildren.

This is not to brag — it is to explain the breadth and depth of people to whom I often direct exactly the same question: How is it that a person can suffer from a deadly cancer and not know it until it is too late? How can you feel fine one minute and expire from an aneurysm the next? And how come when my blood pressure spiked due to a medication reaction last winter — to the point that the doctor went white and said, “You’re going to stroke out!”, which might not be the best thing to say to someone with high blood pressure — I was actually feeling really great. In retrospect, I might have been clenching my teeth at night, but aside from that I felt really good.

Most importantly, how can you feel fine and be deathly ill, yet when you have a cold, you feel like death?

I haven’t received an answer to that question. The doctors I question? They all laugh and acknowledge the truth in what I say. And then we move on to the meat of the interview.

So I sit here, in my misery, suffering from nothing really awful but feeling like nothing but a big does of moan therapy will make me feel better. And not very much at that. By now I must have had at least 90 percent of the 300-odd cold viruses out there. But every year my Darling Son, who learned to share in Kindergarten, brings  home a cold or two and generously passes it on to me. He is a germ conduit, ferrying little viruses from one place to another.

I will keep asking that question why of all the wonderful doctors I interview. If I ever get a good answer, I’ll move onto other questions of medical import, like why we still have toenails when the evolutionary need vanished millenia ago.