As some of you following my WSOP updates may have noticed, I have had some issues with credit cards in Europe.
Oops... I mean I've had some issues with cold symptoms emerging during the past week of WSOP play.
It started at home before I returned to the WSOP. I felt cold symptoms coming on Thursday, June 18, but they mostly subsided the next day, and I registered for the June 20 Extended Play NL event. Then the cold picked up strength, and hit me hard right after the dinner break on Day 1 of that event. The symptoms somewhat moderated after that, and while I had to blow my nose a lot, I was otherwise okay, and in fact did radio the night before the $10k Limit event.
On June 26, the day before the $1500 50/50 NL event, I felt unusually tired, and a weird cough showed up suddenly. The next day, during the event, I started feeling body aches and other symptoms I'm used to being associated with the onset of a new cold. While I can't be 100% certain, I believe I caught a second cold (different strain) at the WSOP -- probably at the 10k event -- and it showed up "on top" of the existing cold from the previous week, which hadn't yet gone away.
I've never had this happen before. I have had back-to-back colds, but never 2 colds at once, until now. But is this possible? The answer is yes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/he...real.html?_r=0
And it turns out not only is this possible, but there is recent evidence that double colds are what lead to the creation of new strains of cold viruses, where they essentially combine through a process called recombination.
At the moment, there are 99 strains of the rhinovirus, which is typically responsible for the common cold. If a new strain was actually created in my body, it would have to be transmitted to enough people to where it could infect a continuous "chain" of people before dying out. Normally this wouldn't happen, as I wouldn't come into contact with mass numbers of people, and even a new cold strain would die out before becoming recognized as #100. However, given that I just played poker with chips that will be touched by thousands of people, and then they will return to various areas of the country and world....