…the infamous Convention Crud. I think the fires and the smoky drive set us up for it. It’s respiratory, and I’m chilled, dizzy and feel like heck, but improving. I laid out this morning and just rested. Now I’m feeling a little better…but Jane’s started coughing.
We were worried when we read that our good friend Mike Moe, who was also at Fencon, had come down with something a few days ago. We had a longer incubation, but this is not (cough*cough) pleasant. Been a while since I’ve caught anything at a con. MAY-be we should’ve gotten our flu shots before we went. I think we will certainly get them after we get over this stuff, in the theory that we may not have met the real flu yet. This responds to Dayquil/Nyquil and Mucinex—Theraflu, not so much: tried that first.
Chicken soup helped: the quick way to semi-homemade: fill saucepan with Swanson’s No MSG Chicken Broth, add Foster Farms Honey-roasted Chicken Strips (frozen); two heaping tablespoons of cooked rice (I tend to cook up a lot at once, then re-heat servings over the next several days, with various toppings;) or bean-thread (Vietnamese); or raw spinach leaves; or pre-cooked pasta; or raw green peas; add black pepper, add celery salt (except with the Bean-thread, use the Vietnamese sweet chili sauce instead, when serving); bring to boil. Serve. It will save you from the plague.
Jane did the chicken and rice number and I immediately felt better.
Hope you both bounce back quickly. Down here in the south we just got our first bit of cold(er) wet weather, and some of my friends are coming down with illnesses. Three of them, and three different variants, naturally.
Good thoughts wafting your way!
Ugh, sorry to hear it.
I’ve got a conference in Toronto beginning 12 October, and another in Thailand beginning 22 October, going from Ireland to both with Ireland in-between. I’m taking vitamins and use antibacterial handwipes in the airport… but I think I’m just going to refuse to shake hands with ANYBODY because with all that much potential jetlag the last thing I need is to come down with anything.
Evertype, for flying remember to bring and frequently use a Xylitol nasal spray – the Xylitol actively blocks bacteria (it fits their sugar receptors but starves the buggers) and the fluid keeps them from getting a ‘foothold’ in your nasal and sinus area. Dry nasal passages are a welcome mat for bacteria!
Hope EVERYONE who got ConCrud is better quick!
Serving once, serving twice, serving chicken soup with rice… My personal favorite is chicken long rice, boneless chicken stewed with bean thread, copious ginger, shiitakes, and small amounts of carrots and celery. Serve with a dash of shoyu. It is good for what ails you.
I was going to say that flying almost guaranteed you would get exposed to whatever nasty was floating around on the plane, but you drove. At least the sick had the good manners to wait until you were home again. Traveling while ill is wretched. Sending peppermint tea and wishes for a speedy recovery.
So sorry you two have the creeping crud. The chicken soup should help. Someone remarked it must be a very old mother and grandmother remedy. Nearly every culture has some form of it, and it works.
I’ll have to look for bean thread in the international foods aisle. I need to try some Asian and Indian restaurants locally. I’m not familiar with enough ingredients. I still miss my favorite Chinese restaurant.
For chicken soup, I’d recommend some chopped celery and carrots, at least. I tend to go with shell or corkscrew pasta, or tricolor.
We had our first cool weather this past weekend, so welcome.
I did stir-fried brown rice with celery, leftover chicken breast and pork, plus some leftover veggie stock and, to try it, a little mango juice. Oh, the rice was leftover, had soy sauce in it. That all probably sounds terrible, but it was actually very tasty. I would, however, use only one kind of meat and add more veggies, any of the stir-fry blends, plus a little corn or baby corn, if fixing fresh.
This week, I’ll look again for tofu. Think I now know where they hide it.
Again, CJ, you might try goldenseal root, since this sounds like it is bacterial, and maybe you might want to try olive leaf extract too, since fungal lung infections are now around (don’t know if you ascribe to the chemtrail problem, but they are spraying fungal spores now, along with the nasty chemicals). Olive leaf extract works amazingly well against internal fungus though, so if the crud keeps hanging around, it may be bacterial OR fungal in nature. Make sure to take either of them with a nice cup of hot tea or coffee to help boost your body’s ability to metabolize them. 🙂
Did you have enough lead time for the vaccine? It’s only recently been available here, and I believe it takes something like 2 weeks before the immunity develops.
I do need to get on the ball and get mine. Wouldn’t be without!
Get well soon, both of you!
I recommend spicy food. Chili peppers are an expectorant and very high in vitamin C (30x higher than oranges).
As for heat level use your tolerance as the measure.
Also good for most sore throats.
Both of you take care and get well.
Thanks, everyone! I’m still doing fine, tho I’m annoyingly tired, and more inclined to play with pictures of my silly new toy than work. The brain is just being reluctant to come online…tho I got some cool ideas for where to take Homecoming Games on the trip, darnit. We really didn’t eat or sleep well on this trip and haven’t been exercising, so we kinda set ourselves up. A few days of proper eating, sleeping and some time out in the garden will have us sassy again in no time!
Make sure with the Mucinex (guaifenisen)that you also drink plenty of fluids. I remember when that stuff was a prescription, the doctor gave it to me to help reduce some of the fluid on my knee. I had to drink plenty of water to keep from getting dehydrated. Go figure…..getting rid of water on the knee, but drinking more water…..yep, that’s biology! Glad Jane’s doing well.
I have my two new kittehs today, Maggie and Sophie, they’re currently in the master bedroom, still inside their carriers with the doors shut. Sydney’s out in the hallway looking in, as though she’s either afraid to go near them, or she’s giving them the evil eye. Personally, I think she’s a little spooked by them. I’m not sure when I should let them out, since I don’t want the senior cats to attack.
Let them out into a bathroom or some such where they can play together (the new ones) and ‘paw tag’ the others under the door…
I have 1 and 1/2 baths. The 1/2 bath is where the litter box for the senior cats is located. I can’t put them in the “master” bathroom, because that’s very small, and a litter box wouldn’t fit in there. So far, I’ve opened the doors to both carriers, let them see each other, and right now, Sophie has walked over to Maggie’s carrier and the two of them are in there together. Well, I’ll see what I can come up with……
This is when it comes in really handy to have one of those big ferret cages like CJ and Jane have and set up in the hotel room when they travel. I have one and each time I introduced a new kitten into the household, they stayed in the cage until they were big enough to hold their own and everyone has hissed and made up. The grown cats can get used to the newbies in a controlled situation where nobody can get hurt. It also gives you a place to sequester a cat if you need to, like one who has had surgery or has been injured. I take a small corrugated cardboard box, seal it shut, and cut a kitten size hole in one side near the bottom, put an el cheapo on sale hand towel inside, and fasten it to the bars of the cage by poking holes in the side of the box and wiring it to the bars. It makes a cheap, neat little hidey hole, and hand towels wash.
Ah, you were in Texas. That explains it. Every time I go to Texas (and this has played out over many many visits) I get sick. Every. Single. Time. Without fail.
So Sorry!
But here’s what I do for creeping crud:
One package chicken Top Ramen
add: LOTS of onion and garlic (as much as you can stand)
Lots of hot chilli pepper AND black pepper.
Spinach (or veggie of choice)
Protein of choice (chicken, meat, etc.)
Just before serving drizzle in two beaten eggs.
Serve and scarf it down.
Also… drink lots of Cranberry juice instead of orange juice.
feel better!
Still getting very little sleep. If I go out of vertical, I can’t breathe, so I spent last night tucked up in a chair. I couldn’t use the Xylytol item Jane got, because it has eucalyptus oil in it—anything of the sort is a very bad allergy for me, be it dried in bouquets or as an oil or whatever. She’s out trying to find another that doesn’t have that included. And at this point I’ll try anything. I need to get back to those scenes I was working on, and I’ve been too sick to work for days now. Conventions, however, wonderful, can have side effects…and this one is a doozie.
Jane got back with the goods (and an apple fritter: love those things, and it’s not on my diet!)—and I tried both. The one is something called Sovereign Silver, which if you have a sore spot stings like fury; the other is Xlear, which is Xylitol, and if that name sounds at all familiar, yes, you’re not crazy: it’s some sort of sweetener, shot up the nose, crazy as it seems—but I’m willing to try anything to be able to lie down and get some real sleep.
And, within 30 minutes of use, the postnasal drip has flat stopped, which stops the sore throat and helps stop the accumulation of crud in the lungs; and I can breathe. Just now and again, my father’s sage advice—when bleeding, just throw some mud on it and keep going [not bad advice in Oklahoma Red, that clay mud that’s instant dry and nearly un-removeable—
In this case it’s dose it with sugar water. In the ancient world two very common meds were warm olive oil (for wounds: the oil would seal the capillaries as well as flush out dirt) and honey, which has mild antibiotic properties, as well as forming a good seal on its own.
The theory behind this is that all the bacteria load up on Xylitol and can’t digest it, so they die without reproducing. I’m for that. Die, bacteria, die!
I’m a huge advocate of the Egyptians favorite med:: honey. I’ve read where they’ve found tombs of regular pyramid workers who had lost a limb and lived many years after. Then they found doctors’ recipes and… honey! I use it on all small wound and especially on my cats rather than neosporin etc. With my recent bout of C-diff (which can’t tolerate sugar because gut bacteria loves sugar) honey was a god-send.
there’s lots to be said about ancient remedies!
It’s probably the silver stuff helping the most. Silver kills nearly every kind of pathogen along with whatever else they put in it. I still say try some goldenseal root though. If you’re willing to toxify your body with an artificial sweetener, then it should be ok to use something that has no side effects and actually kills bacteria, eh? As noted previously, do take it with a cup of hot tea or coffee though, otherwise it may not be very effective. I’ve given it to people who’ve had the creeping crud for months, and within 4 or so hours have it clear right up.
I have quite a few allergies to native plants, so I have to go very slow at trying herbals, but I will give it a look. Seems to be buttercup family; no allergies to that I know of…we’ll see. Ironically, the silver stuff hurts like crazy, real tear-bringing stuff; but the sugar-substitute spray is quite soothing. I’m using it to calm my poor nose down after the other, which wants to be done 7 times the first day. The good news is, it’s stopped the sore throat and headed off the congestion.
Well, allergies would dampen one’s enthusiasm to try herbal stuff, for sure.
In the many years I’ve used it and recommended it though, I’ve never known anyone to have such a reaction to it, but there’s always a first time. The only ‘side’ effect I’ve ever encountered with goldenseal root is when I didn’t need it any longer it tended to take the express route out of my body! 🙂 And definitely taking a capsule versus a tea of it is better because it tastes pretty icky.
The silver, by itself, is pretty mild and doesn’t usually cause pain. It just has a bit of a metallic taste, so probably it’s some other part of the concoction that is causing the burn, but if the combination of stuff does the trick, it’s just part of the price to pay, I guess.
I have to be a bit of a botanist to use herbal things. People tend to think of herbals as benign and easier than prescription meds, because they do grow in the garden, but they can be quite, quite potent, and complex—pharmaceuticals tend to be one thing that’s been singled out and precisely dosed, while plants can have more or less of one potent item, according to the rain that season, and may have more than one active ingredient—coffee and tea are cases in point. OTOH I have the greatest respect for herbal remedies—they are the direct source, after all, of the single-ingredient pharmaceuticals.
I just have to look them up to be absolutely sure they’re not lily family (onions, garlic, lily bulbs, leeks, chives: bad for me) or myrtle (eucalyptus, et al) and a handful of others. I tend to take just a little bit when uncertain, and if my mouth tingles or heart races, this is not a good thing. The scariest reaction I ever got was an herbal item called uvi ursi (bear grapes) that gave me speeding heartbeat and tunnel vision. I was within an ace of calling the ambulance on that one, and then the heartbeat began to slow a bit (from painful) and my vision started to clear, so I decided I was not ambulance material—at the time I was a schoolteacher, and couldn’t afford a medical call with ambulance—I’d have been a year paying that off—so I waited longer than I would have now. That one’s merrily sold over the counter as a common ingredient in herbal diuretics, but for me it’s quite something else.
Yes I can see why you’d be so cautious! If I ever had a reaction like that, I’d have been much more leery!
But because of all these allergies you have, first off, I would say go find a good liver flush and clean out your liver. After years and years, the liver accumulates all sorts of crap which gets turned into stones to protect us from the nasty stuff. (Those really aren’t gall stones; they’re actually from the liver, but can’t be seen on x-rays until they calcify.) So, just like trying to run water thru a garden hose full of marbles, it really starts to impair the liver’s function.
And that is the underlying cause for a LOT of allergies. It’s your body’s way of saying, “HEY, stop sending so much stuff thru here! We can’t handle it anymore!” So a good liver flush will get out the stones and allow the liver to function more optimally. I have the information for one that only takes overnight and works quite well if followed to the letter, if you’d like it. I’ve gotten out stones as big as my thumb with it. No pain either.
Also I recently stumbled upon the cold laser information. One gal, Sandi Radomski (ND, L.C.S.W.) sells them and has a protocol to go with for dealing with allergies.
http://www.allergyantidotes.com/etox_lasers.htm
Her take on the problem is that many times allergies start when the particular food or substance is around during a traumatic event, and the body associates the trauma with the substance, and begins rejecting it.
Anyway, I’d done a number of liver flushes myself, so I had very few allergies left, but the laser treatment did the trick for mold and mildew, and something in ice cream (which wasn’t related to a dairy allergy) that the liver flush didn’t seem to help. But since mold and mildew was definitely associated with my childhood which in general was an ongoing traumatic event, I can see why the laser might have helped when the liver flush didn’t. 🙂
Too, you might want to learn to do muscle testing. It was originally used to discern what was good for the body or not. One easy way is to do said testing is to hold the herb/food/substance in your hands and stand relaxed with feet slightly apart (less than shoulder width) and ask if this substance is good for you.
Usually you will find yourself leaning forward if it is, backwards if it isn’t. Of course you’d want to establish your baseline response by doing some tests of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions you already know the answer to, to check what your body actually does for each. You can hold it in the bottle even; just ask about the substance in the bottle.
FYI: Taking my physical well being into my own hands and not believing much of what big pharma via their lapdog medical industry says has kept me off of any kind of drug; I’ve never actually been to the hospital, not even the emergency room other than to visit; had a brown recluse spider bite which I dealt with myself which has left no scarring (just glad I knew EFT to deal with the anaphylactic shock though!); have dealt with and gotten rid of diabetes; got rid of high blood pressure without drugs; I’m having my hair thickening back up and returning from gray back to brown; and a number of other things that ‘modern medicine’ would never have been able to do with their big pharma-based ‘give ’em a pill to fix it’ mentality. Big pharma is really NOT our friend, despite their efforts to whitewash themselves and brainwash us into believe they are.
Just remember that herbal medications, although they can be very effective, have the same risks that other drugs do: adverse reactions and interactions, allergies, etc. They also don’t have standardized doses, because as CJ noted, potency varies according to growing conditions. Plants rarely get administered by pharmacologists or MDs, often ending up as over the counter, self-administered treatment. “All-natural!” includes hemlock and poison ivy… Europe is better at trying to regulate and formalize plant medicines, but they allow other concoctions about which I am dubious.
Actually, plants have far few side effects than pharmaceutical products, despite their propaganda to the contrary. From what I see, the greedy pharmaceutical companies deliberately make their drugs far more toxic than need be, so they can make and sell other drugs to counteract those ‘side effects’. It is all about money for those greedy 1%.
They figure in the cost of lawsuits for wrongful deaths as part of doing business. Their goal is to get as much money as they can before someone sues them for killing someone they love. Then they may or may not pull the drug, depending on how much publicity the case gets.
Also there are some brands of herbs that sell a standardized dosage; costs a bit more but if that’s a concern for you, that addresses the issue quite well, I think.
In my experience over the last 20 years or so, I’ve found many herbs to be more effective than anything the medical industry has, like for example olive leaf extract. Any anti-fungal from good ole’ big pharma is highly toxic for the liver, and costs an arm and a leg. Olive leaf extract is quite effective and doesn’t have side effects unless you are allergic from what I’ve seen.
But of course big pharma is doing all that they can to scare people away from the far less expensive and actually much more effective herbal solutions because they can’t patent them and then control how much they cost.
Oh, big pharma, one of the greedy 1%’s strongest arms, is NOT going to let us have anything that cuts into their profit margin. They care not in the least about human suffering or pain other than it gets them sued. And the sooner most people realize this and start fighting back, the better.
I am feeling better since the above treatments. Notably, the postnasal drip has quit, so I can talk without sounding like a frog, and it has not gone over to a runny nose.
Jane has also provided me with 3 monster pillows to go with the 3 I usually use, so when I go to bed tonight, I am going to be able to sleep at any angle required. I am looking forward to this.
Just got the news that our favorite large store for stuff as well as groceries and prescriptions, is folding: the Fred Myers opposite the rink is going bye-bye. This is going to require some major life adjustment. I hate going to Walmart for stuff; it’s a monster, there are always lines, and I don’t like their stuff as well. Also they don’t sell groceries to speak of because there’s a Safeway at the other end of the parking lot, so it’s an expedition to go to these two. Costco doesn’t have everything I need, brands-wise, and size-wise. A local chain and another pair of Safeways look like the choice, but glug—this was so convenient.
The Greeks and Romans bathed with olive oil. A lady or gentleman always had an oil jar, and it was a finishing touch. You rubbed it on all over, did your hair with it (in moderation) and used a strigil (scraper) to be sure you moved any excess off. Athletes used it and sand, probably a substitute for resin. But olive oil, definitely, for the complexion and to ease dry air. It really absorbs fast, and is a lot better than most fine preparations sold for a lot of money.
Since you mentioned a “strigil”, you remind me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask. There’s a rhodendron species R. strigillosum. Most pronounce it with a soft g sound, like “jill”, but best I’ve been able to find it should be a hard g, like a fish’s “gill”. Which is correct? (TIA)
In Latin, with native accent, you would say strih-gil-LO-soom. But scientific names use the English version and soften the g, so strih-jil-LO-sum. Of course if you are a French or Turkish botanist pronouncing it, you do as YOUR country does it. 😉
Thanks, I’ve been using the Latin pronounciation.
Personally, I’d avoid Walmart for groceries anyway, and their quality for other goods has gone down. Sympathies. My local Kroger’s is pretty good about most groceries.
I hope you and Jane are well soon and can enjoy the holiday at month’s end.
I have avoided any big illness since about March, thankfully. Hoping to avoid getting anything this winter. If this winter is as mostly warm as last winter, it may not be a problem, though that creates other things of their own.
I’m so glad I got the bread machine you talked about. Very satisfying. That and an occasional homemade pizza or using my new-ish wok, all quite fine. Hmm…might do homemade pizza this weekend if I have enough fresh veggies on hand. I’ve been lazy about cooking lately.