Crying Wolf

I have a cough. It is a mild cough. About as mild as a cough can be, without it not being a cough at all. I've had it for two days and was ignoring it until I spoke to my sister, who is in Portugal, on the phone earlier today.  - Is that a cough? - Yes. - Is it dry? - Yes. - Is it persistant?  Good question. Define persistant. Are we talking - 

Or more like - 

  In any case, surely persistance is the definition of A Cough, as opposed to an incidence of coughing? So...  - Yes. - Obviously you are taking all proper precautions such as coughing into a tissue and then throwing it away immediately...? - Er...  It seems that some weird role reversal has taken place whereby I, the family hypochondriac, am being blase about a potentially deadly illness, while my sister, who is usually as unflappable as a duck with no wings, is telling me to take it more seriously. What am I supposed to do under these circumstances? Something happens to a person after a lifetime of discovering that the terrible incurable maybe fatal illness that they definitely have this time is actually heat rash. I have by now trained myself not to react to any kind of health "emergency" until I am halfway dead. (Halfway dead by my standards, which is about an eighth way dead for anybody else.) I'm like the boy who cried wolf, except I really thought that shadow of a branch / strange howling of the wind / eyes gleaming at me through the darkness that turned out to be someone's bicycle lights was a wolf. And now I've had it so drummed into me that anything I see that looks like a wolf could not possibly be a wolf, that when there is a wolf literally staring me in the face, I am saying it's probably a dog. Except that it is probably a dog. Isn't it?

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