Your nose is running faster than a Triple Crown winner.
From your throat blasts a basso rumble with all the percussion of the "1812 Overture."
But you're still standing, still able to get the kids off to school and deliver that report to the boss.
Chances are, you do NOT have the flu.
So how do you tell the difference between a garden-variety albeit highly nettlesome cold and influenza, a malady that peaks in January or later and contributes to the deaths of 20,000 Americans annually?
In many respects, it's a matter of degrees.
"We see fever of up to 105 with the flu with the common cold, you don't get those kinds of fevers," says Dr. Penny Tenzer, vice chair of the University of Miami's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.
When it comes to flu versus cold, it helps to think in terms of a continuum of lousiness. If you have the flu, you feel lousy all over. If you have a cold, your lousy feelings are localized.
Says Tenzer: "If you have symptoms that are outside of the normal range of a cold outside of congestion, feeling a little bit run-down, low-grade fever if you're feeling extremely wiped out, unable to eat, severe muscle aches and fatigue and chills and high fevers, I think it's worthwhile to see your doctor."
Worthwhile because your doctor can do more today than ever to help the ravages of winter's dose of viral misery.
But like many things in life, timing is everything when it comes to flu.
"And you have to have health professionals who have a pretty good idea of what they're doing," says Dr. Landis Crockett, director for disease control in the Florida Department of Health.
Physicians have an easily administered test to determine definitively if a patient has flu. And they have two newcomers in their medicine cabinet: Tamiflu and Relenza, influenza-quashing drugs that landed in the pharmaceutical arsenal during the past couple of flu seasons.
Thing is, to be most effective they need to be taken soon after the arrival of symptoms, typically within 24 to 36 hours.
"Instead of feeling lousy for seven days," says Dr. Gio Baracco, a UM infectious disease specialist, "you feel lousy for 5 1/2 days."
The people who can benefit most from the new medications are the same people most at peril from the flu: "The people who die from influenza are usually the older people or the people with underlying diseases," says Dr. H. Barry Baker, an infectious disease specialist at Baptist Hospital in Kendall, Fla. "If they have heart disease or lung disease or diabetes, they might get sicker."
The common cold won't vanish with a dose of flu drugs, because colds are caused by different viruses. Those viruses tend to lodge in the upper respiratory tract, in the nose and throat.
The best way to prevent becoming sick with the flu in the first place is to get a shot in the arm. Top candidates for vaccination are people older than 65, patients with chronic illnesses and compromised immune systems and health-care workers and pregnant women.
And flu season is a good time to be selfless.
"Let's say you live with grandmother and she is elderly and has heart disease and lung disease or whatever," Baracco says. "Even if getting the flu might not be such a big thing for yourself, you might get it and give it to her and then she would be in big trouble. So you should think about getting a flu shot."
To appreciate just how lethal influenza can be: Cardiovascular disease was the No. 1 killer in every year of the 20th century except 1918. That was the year of the epic influenza outbreak in the United States.
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