After my good long rant the other day about colds, I have made some decisions. Usually I don't take the view that we can really control things. But this thing needs some extra attention and I am going to make some extra effort. So I'm going to ask people for advice, and I'm going to follow it. I'm going to follow all of it (within reason). There is a hilarious segment on a This American Life episode of years ago where Sarah Vowell gets advice about insomnia and tries to follow it all; it includes dreadful things like not having caffeine (!) or alcohol (!).
So, here is what I have collected so far, from myself and others:
- handwashing: aggressive, regular, vigorous, proper handwashing
- washing of other people's hands, particularly those people under 4' tall who are likely to insert their hands in my mouth/nose/ears/eyes
- hand sanitising/sterilising (especially the small infectious vector-creatures as above)
- multivitamin
- zinc
- echinacea (particularly when getting a cold)
- vitamin C
- oil of oregano (thought to induce mild fever, thus assisting to 'burn' rhinovirus out of the nose, as it prefers a 33C environment)
- on a similar note, using a blow dryer, make the inside of the nose both hot and dry
(what is the half-life of the viral particles, though? Do I need to do this for 3 hours or something? happy to try it for a few minutes - after all, it's unlikely to hurt me unless my hair gets pulled in or something)
- ???
If anyone has any more tips, keep them coming. I am (gasp) going to ask on (dreaded) facebook too. That is just how desperate we are here ...
In other news, took the bike today after Wednesday's tube tantrum in which Annika spat out bits of a rather nice pain au chocolat I'd bought (after she whined relentlessly), and flicked one of the spat-out bits on some poor sucker sitting next to us. It was pretty bad. We biked, yesterday and today, and got wet today. It was drizzling hard. We were fine though.
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| Tantrum on the tube |
Colds. I really hate colds. There's a post somewhere back years ago called something about 1000 colds. We've had, we're having, our first big one of this season. I am looking down the cold, wet tunnel that is this winter, and I'm imagining all the hours I'll spend beside a box of tissue, almost completely incapacitated by endless sneezing; all the nights I'll spend with a roll of toilet paper beside the bed, all the embarrassing hacking chesty coughing I'll do during seminars, meetings, concerts, and I'm filled with dread, with a desire to sell up, buy myself a desert island somewhere and retire. Annika got sent home on Friday, not two hours after I took her all the way over there. I was sick too - that's yet another thing I hate about commuting to childcare: having to go all the way to work when I'm not feeling well because the other alternative is to take care of an active baby when I'm not feeling well. Anyway, she got sent home (as did I, effectively), I took her to the doctor even, and he said her ears were very red and no wonder she was so miserable. I was completely flattened by the damn cold on Saturday to the point of wheezing and chest pain, and I can't even bring myself to describe where that led. Now Nina's showing signs of it and A- has it.
All this work I do, all this stuff - some days I feel like turning it all on its head and trying to cure the common cold. I mean, why not engineer some virus that can out-compete the common cold in the host (ie, in your nose)? (not that I can do that but maybe someone else could...). It should have very low virulence (ie it would not make you sick). So you wouldn't sneeze it out, and it wouldn't be transmitted. So it wouldn't survive, naturally - the other colds would win. But, if we all went to the pharmacy and bought the damn thing so we wouldn't get the worse colds, it could win after all - it would transmit by social media, by capitalism, by word of mouth rather than by actual mouth and daycare centres and snot-to-snot toddler contact. And it would make someone very very rich. And it would make me very very happy. And, although I admit that it's kind of creepy, is it more creepy than this? (warning: gross). Actually, the problem isn't creepiness, the problem is that the little thing would mutate and turn into god knows what and recombine with all the flus and whatnot out there and that presents all manner of risks. But what gain, oh, I think it might be worth it.
Ok, enough about colds. I'm doing a big grant proposal, it is almost done and I am enjoying thinking about it being done. I actually don't mind writing proposals; it's fun to think about all the amazing stuff you're going to do when everything goes perfectly and you can hire great people and your ideas all work out. It just gets a bit much as you keep writing and re-writing. I've noticed that a very large portion of what I do is writing, oddly enough for someone with my training. In other news, Nina's reading is coming along in leaps and bounds. Annika is talking lots and generally being cute. She has taken up a dummy/pacifier, which she got interested in just before we went to Canada, and which I somewhat indecisively let her have, thinking that anything to ease a 10hr flight was well worth it. She calls it 'game'; I have no clue why. She loves it, and it is so incredibly easy to put her to bed because it's in the bed (it stays in the bed). We joke that she's got game. A- found a wine description on a menu that said the wine goes well with game. We chuckled. Oh - and I'm joining a choir; I auditioned, and I got in. Given that I already had the cold, had to walk 20 minutes in the rain from the tube to get there, had very little time to practice because we had a visitor, and practiced the wrong things because they misinformed me, I feel pretty good about it! (well, either I did well or they have low standards - guess I'll see). I'm hoping Nina can come to the concert in December; she'd have to stay up late, and Annika would have to have a babysitter.
In the meantime, I am hoping to take up very very frequent hand-washing, vitamins, and I'm going to really try not to go to work when I feel horrible. And maybe I'll get an inhaler or something in case the horrible wheezy thing returns. If anyone reads this and has great cold prevention or eradication ideas, please let me know. Please.
