Saturday night I felt a bit off. Sunday I was definitely not well, but helped Jeff install the new Conner VHF repeater on the knoll above our house anyway. Monday removed all doubt. . I . was . sick.
Missy recalls a candid MD telling her she could do nothing and get well in about fourteen days. Or he could prescribe some stuff for her to take and she would recover in about two weeks. I have heard and experienced similar. It’s a virus. They don’t have reputable tools for viruses.
I added Lung, Bronchial & Sinus Health and Defense Plus to my supplement diet. They have served me well for a lot of years. I definitely needed all the help they might give.
Headache, sore throat, fever (chills), sinus jammed, lungs full of crap, coughing, sneezing, all my joints and everything in between them ached. One of those times when a demon or fairy pops up offering to put you out of your misery and you simply say, “Thank you.”
I followed the orders my body gave me, staggering from laying to sitting and back to bed. My temperature elevated to kill or injure the infection. I turned on the electric blanket and added bedclothes to help out. If I felt chilled, I added heat. Get too warm, cut back on the coverings.
The signals are pretty clear, it doesn’t take a computer program to follow those instructions. Good thing, because my thinking was extremely limited. Jammed sinuses and powerful headache cramp the calculator.
Coughing was a major workout. I could feel my whole body tense up for the job, then the cough was some sort of total-body spasmodic explosion simultaneously tensing every muscle in my body and hurting me from my toes to my nose.
We got reports from others in the Bitterroot that the bug running around here was lasting two to four weeks, often turning into pneumonia or strep throat.
That brings me to my way of listening to my body, understanding the message and working WITH IT, rather than against.
As a society, we must have become enamored of fever suppression as soon as we found ways to do it. Many people don’t stop to consider what they are doing when they mess with Mother Nature. As I mentioned in a previous paragraph, the fever has a purpose. Wisdom helps it work rather than crippling or eliminating one of the few really good anti-viral tools the body has.
Similarly, cough suppression covers four long shelves at the drug store. What other tools does your body have to remove excess phlegm from your bronchia and lungs??? Do you expect the AMA to surgically remove it? The Good Fairy to go in with a shop vac?
Water. Lots of Water. I am better than average, but don’t often get to that “recommended 8 glasses a day” except on hot days. I was on it. Water to flush the bad stuff out of the system. Water to keep the mucus flowing. Water to keep the cells and joints hydrated. We had a small sample bottle of doTERRA orange that I used a couple drops per glass to add vitamin C and palatability.
Sunlight. I forced myself to go outside two or three times a day just to soak up some sunrays. They are powerful medicine and I was collecting whatever possibilities I could.
I felt constantly exhausted with just enough inspiration to move from one room of our little house to another for a change of position or to snuggle back under the covers, maybe with the hardly-used electric blanket ON. Roll with it. Do what feels right, even if it is NOTHING.
More water. We have tea before bed most evenings. The Breathe Easy we always keep on hand was pretty much a no-brainer. A couple cups were good and smart.
Wednesday I was thinking I detected a slight decrease in the awfulness I was feeling. Optimism crept in that I might recover. If the demon or fairy offered to put me out of my misery I might have asked for a day to think it over.
We had seen an essential oils presentation over a week before. Information I had read made it sound intriguing. With thousands of years of human experience built into it, Big Pharma solutions seem completely experimental in comparison.
As luck would have it our doTERRA “Family Physician Kit” arrived Wednesday, the crucial companion to the book “Modern Essentials“, which is a guide to essential oil use regardless of brand and source.
A quick websearch was necessary to decide if I had “a cold” or “the flu”. Then The Book listed helpful oils and their application. Missy helped me make up a concoction with a few drops of four different oils in a base of coconut oil. I began smearing that on my sinuses, back and chest whenever the mood struck me.
Thursday morning the demons and fairies can go elsewhere in search of a market. I’m feeling good enough to have a cup of coffee. Simultaneously unsurprising, unanticipated and retrospectively obvious, my powerful caffeine-withdrawal headache was soon gone. For sure that the jammed sinuses were beginning to clear was a factor as well, but caffeine is well-known for dissolving headaches and famous for punishing those who quit using it regularly – and I hadn’t been in the mood for a cuppa’Joe all week.
My cough was bringing up less stuff, but I was still coughing – those ineffective, empty, wracking coughs. My mind is starting to work, though.
More Judo time. HELP the cough be effective. Add expectorant. Those stupid shelves nearly always mix suppressants with expectorant… craziness… We will stop the cough, but if one happens to sneak by, it will be more effective. You have to look, but the good stuff IS available without the bad.
Today, Friday, I was feeling so good I showered, cleaned up and took two computers to the Darby Library for new installations of Linux Mint operating system. While not exactly a 10K, it was something inconceivable as recently as Wednesday. Heck, I even got one of them to work exactly as desired – one brand-new Windows 7 Opsys bites the dust 🙂
One seriously upgraded new computer for my friend Al.
This rather obviously is not a double-blind, large-sampling experiment. All, some or none of the above may have affected the outcome.
Your mileage may vary.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull out exactly the same tool kit if those symptoms come my way again. I share them here for you to pick and chose from to your heart’s content.
