How do I title this post? Preparedness for being sick when you're usually never sick? Solo self care? Keeping your wits about you when you're sick as a dog?
During this past week I suffered through my first flu since 2012 when I quit smoking. For the math challenged, that's 12 years since I was last sick at all. When I smoked I had several bad colds or one vicious flu every winter, bronchitis all winter, a chronic cough all year. I have felt so liberated by vaping, which saved me from the smoker's ill health.
Until Monday of this week. I don't know what it was. Maybe a plain old flu. Maybe an allergic reaction to changes in the pollens and detritus in the air with the onset of springtime. Otherwise I had no unusual exposures. I had people over for dinner the previous Friday night. We were all perky and healthy. If I caught something then, you'd think it would have begun to manifest later that night or at least by Saturday or Sunday. But it wasn't until Monday morning that I woke with a sore throat, bad cough, sneezing, runny nose, aches, and a full day of work ahead. You can't even have "sick" in your lexicon when you work at home without support staff.
Now that I'm on the mend,
@Jimi and I had a brief conversation about self care. As I mentioned there, I favor natural cures, but when you can barely lift your head you don't feel like whipping up a natural treatment. I agree with Jimi that honey infused with ginger is the best liquid cough drop there is. You can also chop an onion, squeeze the juice into honey, and make a time honored respiratory treatment, or just warm chopped onion in honey and pour it over cooked rice when you ought to eat something. But I didn't want food. I ate refreshing canned pineapple chunks to feel better. In the most severe phase of a respiratory illness you can't even stand in the kitchen that long.
The point is that when I smoked and was sick all the time, I always had my preferred OTC treatments at hand: Nyquil, the real original product with the 10 percent alcohol content, Halls cough drops with menthol vapors that rise in your nose and throat and really make you feel better. At the office I had Dayquil and Halls stashed in my desk. Having never been sick a day since 2012 when vaping saved my health by allowing me to stop smoking, I was unprepared to be really sick.
So what did I do to get better so quickly (half dead on Monday to about 90 percent well by Friday)? I slept a lot, really a lot. I keep a little jar of stick cinnamon in the cabinet. I did have the presence of mind to drop a whole cinnamon stick into my large hot coffee each morning for a fragrant, comforting remedy. I could have spooned honey into my evening mint tea, to make a kind of liquid cough drop, but I limited myself, without thinking, to my normal preference for unsweetened hot beverages. So my own straitjacketed thinking caused me to miss a quickly concocted "liquid cough drop" that probably would have eased my breathing. Why didn't it occur to me to pour a shot of any of the excellent booze I have here, add some honey to it, and go off to dreamland easily? I have a jar of maraschino cherry juice in the fridge, which I saved to mix with vodka for cough syrup if I should ever need it. In the haze of my helpless misery, I forgot all about that.
So my shopping list has this on it:
Wedderspoon Organic Manuka Honey Drops, Eucalyptus
Ingredients:
Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Manuka Honey, Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Eucalyptus Oil, Menthol Crystals, Propolis
That's just to have something to grab if I ever again become too weak to stand and figure out what natural cure to make. Anyway I'm sure that after all these years since my last flu in 2012, I would no longer want the other ingredients besides alcohol in the Nyquil, nor the other ingredients besides menthol in the Halls cough drops.
And I'll make Jimi's suggested honey/ginger mixture to store in the fridge. And I'll mix some of my Tito's Texas vodka with that maraschino cherry juice I saved, into a tightly capped bottle, and leave that in the fridge. Next time I won't be so blindsided by waking up sick.
The challenges of solo self care during the past week brought to mind what Jacques Pepin once said, "one always cooks for the other". I prefer living alone, but it would have been nice to have somebody make my grandma's cure, a hot mixture of honey, whiskey and lemon, just for me, and feed it to me on a big spoon the way she did. Her care was what healed me, much more so than the wonderful medicine she made.
Preparedness is what has to take up the slack.