God, yes! To deal with it I plug my nostrils with tissue, which saturates in 15-20 minutes and I get to try again. But if you’re not careful, you can abrade the inside of your nose, too.
Me too. The coughing I can handle, especially if it’s removing junk from my lungs (I find that therapeutic), the soreness is usually partially-fixed with painkillers, as are the headaches and sinus pain.
But the stuffed nose, especially when I lie down, wrecks my sleep and I need my sleep. I tried Sudafed and not even Valium would counter it, so I actually felt even worse on that combo and probably didn’t do my heart much good. Instead I try to sleep with a bunch of pillows in a semi-sitting position and use sleep aids to help.
Sore throat. By the options, anything mentioning coughing. I can’t remember any major congestion in the last 20 years that a good shower can’t help some. I think that I didn’t even learn that Mucinex was a drug until I was 30 or so.
Fever wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t sweat like a pig every time it comes down. And during a long flu that could be a dozen times, each occasion turning my bed into something resembling a bath.
One time it got so bad I was sleeping in my bathrobes, and slept somehow so badly on top of the thick belt that I hurt a rib. Flu went away eventually but that rib hurt for the next month or so.
My loathing of congestion is what led to my nasal decongestant addiction when I was a teenager.i will still use it, but only very small doses when I just can’t stand it one more second. Because of course it can also lead straight to the total absence of mucous and resulting tenderness that doesn’t have any votes but which to me is almost as bad as the congestion…
Something else: the sore throat, or in fact any pain (headache, joint pain, sinus pain, digestive pain, sore, tender skin). I can deal with any of the physical symptoms, but really don’t like pain.
Deep into onset, when all hope of kicking it off has gone, and your throat is so sore every swallow produces a feverish shiver of such intensity it leaves you feeling weak and feeble.
By this point, you know there’s no escape and part of the misery you feel is the knowing dread of what’s to follow. Of how your next couple of days will be.
That’s the worst for me.
It’s a tie between the tickly cough and the blocked nose. The tickly cough sucks - you cough (which is frequently painful because you’ve been coughing so much) and it goes away for .01 of a millisecond, only to reemerge stronger. You end up want to just stick a wad of sandpaper down your throat to scratch it. When the phlemgy cough comes around, it’s a relief.
The blocked nose keeps me up at night - you end up doing that thing where you change the side you’re lying on every 5 minutes in an attempt to clear up one nostril (yeah, yeah, TMI, sorry).
I agree that really high fevers can be sort of fun. Though I’d choose TS Eliot rather than Poe, but that’s a matter of personal taste. 
I once knew a girl who switched from Marlboros to Kools when she had a cold, claiming it helped her symptoms.
Because of this (and pollen allergies), I only buy lotion tissues.
Anyway, I really really hate the late-cold/flu coughing. I know I need to cough to get the gunk out of my chest. But…I’ve been hacking for what feels like six months (really about three days), and it’s exhausting. I go to sleep coughing. I wake up coughing. I sit around clutching a pillow to my chest while coughing (because now coughing hurts).
Tell me about it. I knew a smoker who one time it took her a whole 10 minutes to find her glasses. Smoked right through it she did. Addictions a bitch.
Thank goodness you had your stockpots.
Coughing. I can sleep with the other symptoms but a cough that won’t abate is what I worry about the most every time I get a cold because I’ve spent far too many nights sleeping only an hour or two for weeks at a time due to coughing. I don’t get sick often due to being a bit of a germaphobe, but when I do, being asthmatic means I’m really good at it. Odds are about 50-50 that what begins as a head cold will decide it’d really rather live in my chest instead.
Breathing through my mouth, because I wake up several times a night with my mouth dry, and sometimes I even have weird dreams caused by the dry mouth. If I take decongestants, they either don’t work, but make the dry mouth worse, or they work, but then my nose it dry too, and my mouth gets kind of dry even though I’m not breathing through it, and I still keep waking up with a feeling of horror.
Coughing would win out if cough medicine didn’t work, but fortunately it does, and antihistamines usually stop my nose from dripping when my mucous is thin.
for me it’s the sore throat. when I get one, it feels like I spent the day gargling razor blades.
Last month I had two days of minor flu symptoms, followed by (to date) 22 days of coughing.
Non-prescription cough medicine is worthless. I may as well drink water. The only thing that works is prescription cough medicine, which is . . . an extremely powerful narcotic. My head is floating somewhere in the asteroid belt. I sleep 10 hours a night, and when I wake up I’m raring to go for a nap.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Coughing sucks.
The mouth-breathing is the absolute worst. I hate heavy nasal congestion during the day but when you’re trying to sleep its unbearable. I’m in the final stages of a stupid winter cold right now. Definitely looking forward to the end of the week.
I think the worst is when your sinuses are all stuffed up but it randomly decides to spew clear snot everywhere at random times like you’re some sort of human faucet. I guess that’s a subset of congestion. It doesn’t stop when you lay down to sleep, so at 4 am you can suddenly feel your sinusworks turning on and you have to wake yourself up all the way and scramble for a tissue.
I really hate it when you don’t anticipate going full-blown sickness and you’re blowing your nose as usual, except woops now it’s the 3rd day in and your nose is getting seriously chapped and painful from all the rubbing. Thankfully I’m much more aware than I was as a kid so I realize when I need to start dabbing at my snot much earlier or start applying vaseline.
I get backaches, muscle aches, fever, and crawly sensitive skin every time I get sick with anything but really what takes the cake is all the sinus stuff. Well, the fever is pretty bad because whenever I have a fever I can’t sleep properly, so I am exhausted, so my body can’t recover as well.
And if it turns into an ear infection, ugh! But that’s a whole other thing.
But coughing? I’ll cough until it hurts to move rather than deal with some of that other stuff.