Tag Archives: health

Snowbirding 2020 Postcards: The Cold

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I battle a cold while I travel.

There’s not much that’s worse than having a cold when you’re on the road. Having a drippy runny nose and a mild cough when you’re forced to cover hundreds of miles in less than perfect driving conditions. Feeling your nose get raw as you try to soak up all that watery snot with whatever paper products are available. Feeling ever muscle in your body ache when you get out to refuel. Ugh.

That was me on the second day of my trip. The drip started slowly but was in full faucet mode by the time I reached Las Vegas and set up “camp” at the KOA. The only medicine I had was Benadryl and I took it. I got plenty of rest but the cold was worse the next day. I drove with the tissue box beside me.

My first stop in Wickenburg on Thursday was the local CVS pharmacy. That’s where I bought my preferred cold remedy: Alka-Seltzer Plus Day/Night. Plop plop fizz fizz. This stuff calms cold symptoms so I can do what I have to do during the day and sleep like the dead at night.

Plop Plop Fizz Fizz
Armed for cold fighting. CVS also had my very favorite tissues: Puffs with Vicks. I absolutely love the eucalyptus aroma.

And I really did need this stuff. On arrival in Wickenburg, I almost immediately had to set up my jewelry booth at my first show of the season. When I was finished near sunset, I went back to my camper, dosed up, and passed out — which is exactly what I needed to do.

The next day — Friday — my cold peaked. I could tell it had reached its absolute worst point. At one point, I actually fell asleep sitting in my booth. I had enough energy to join my friends for grilled salmon at our campers before repeating my evening ritual. I was dead asleep by 8 PM.

I was over the hump on Saturday with a nasty headache but clear sinuses. Ibuprofen with my daytime dose had me fully functional for the second day of the show. I was even able to make three pendants, including a custom pendant for a customer.

As I type this Sunday morning, I’m back to 90% of what I should be. I’ll continue taking it easy for the next few days to avoid a relapse.

A(nother) Short Story about the State of US Healthcare

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Who wants a “pre-existing condition” these days?

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few recent thoughts related to the healthcare situation in the United States.

I’m in my late 50s now and have, for the first time, begun spending a lot of time doing close work with my hands. Making jewelry with fine wire and small tools doesn’t put a lot of strain on my hands, but it apparently does work the muscles and joints more than I’m accustomed to.

Arthritis runs in my family. I clearly remember my grandmother on my mother’s side, who lived to be about 90, complaining about it once in a while. She had typical “old lady hands,” that included thick knuckles and crooked joints under wrinkled skin. She’d spent nearly a lifetime doing close work with her hands in a garment factory, starting work when she was as young as 13 and working until many years later when my grandfather had a stroke and she had to stay home to care for him.

I’ve had knee problems on and off throughout my life. They always got worse when I was heavier and disappeared when I lost a lot of weight back in 2012. But before they disappeared — back when I had a lot of disposable income and a decent health care plan — I went to a doctor about it. Arthritis, he said, pointing at the x-rays.

Handxray
X-ray of a hand from Wikipedia. I’ve got my own x-rays around here somewhere.

More recently, a fall off the back of my truck that sprained an ankle apparently fractured some bones in my left wrist, which I’d landed on. While trying to diagnose the occasional swelling and severe pain (caused by “floating bodies,” we later discovered during arthroscopic surgery that removed most of them), the doctor took x-rays. He pointed out the early signs of arthritis in my wrists and hands.

So yeah. I have arthritis.

It’s gotten to the point that it’s starting to bother me enough to seek medical solutions that don’t necessarily include painkillers. (I can take Vitamin I (ibuprofen) without a doctor telling me to, and I’m not interested in anything stronger.) Would exercises help? CBD creams (as everyone keeps telling me)? Heat or ice therapy? Vitamin supplements? I’m not interested in querying Dr. Google because we all know that there’s enough bad advice there to drown out the good advice. I want to visit a doctor, have her take new x-rays, and tell me what I can do to slow the progression of this very common problem.

And here’s the rub.

If I go to an arthritis specialist — provided I can get an appointment with one — I’m making a very public (on my medical records) statement that I have a medical problem bad enough to seek medical help. In other words, I’m admitting I have a condition that, once admitted, becomes a “pre-existing” condition for future health care coverage.

Now, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, AKA “Obamacare”), as it was passed by the government and enacted into law, pre-existing conditions didn’t matter. But things are different now.

Let me tell you another story about pre-existing conditions prior to the ACA.

Years ago, when I was very heavy, I was having digestive issues that included GERD, heartburn, acid reflux, and vomiting. To this day, I think it was a hiatal hernia but at the time I was unable to find a doctor to offer any advice beyond “take Pepcid AC.” Back in those days, I made the fatal error of mentioning “chest pain” as a symptom. As you might imagine, that triggered a flurry of heart tests, all of which came back negative. I did not have a heart problem, I had a digestive problem. I blogged about this in detail way back in 2010.

This profit-driven nonsense established me in medical records with a “pre-existing heart condition” that didn’t exist. All of the tests came back negative! So when my idiot wasband lost his job (again), made a late COBRA payment, and got our health insurance canceled, the insurance company refused to cover me when they started the insurance back up. I had a “pre-existing heart condition,” they said.

For six of the scariest months of my life, I had no health insurance because a couple of greedy doctors put me through a battery of unnecessary heart tests and an idiot couldn’t manage his money properly. It wasn’t scary because of my health. It was scary because if, during the time I was uninsured, I got some kind of real negative health diagnosis (think cancer) or had an accident at home (think falling down the stairs) that put me into the hospital or long term treatment, I could lose everything I owned. Medical bankruptcy is a real thing here in the United States and I was set up to become a victim.

I got limited insurance coverage back and later got my own damn insurance again so I didn’t have to worry about an idiot screwing things up for me. The ACA really helped things; it was as if those old medical issues simply didn’t exist. And, so far, I haven’t had insurance denied because of these things — although the rate has gone up dramatically since Trump took office. Next year, who knows?

So here I am in 2019. I have arthritis in my hands and want help to prevent it from getting worse quickly. But I’m afraid to make an appointment with a specialist because I’m afraid to get the condition on my medical records. So instead, I’ll keep waiting, letting the condition likely get worse. All because I don’t want to be denied insurance coverage in the future.

Is it right? Does it makes sense? No and no. But there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it other than emigrate to a country with decent health care for all. And believe me, I’ve been thinking about it.

So that’s my situation as I type this.

At least the CBD cream smells nice.

Dealing with Two Colds in Three Months

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It’s really all about rest.

It’s funny how when you pay attention to your body it tells you things about yourself and the way your body works.

The September Cold

Back in September, a few days before I was due to head out on a trip to Lopez Island, I got struck down by a cold. It came upon me suddenly with a lot of sneezing and a very runny — more like drippy — nose. (I call that leaky faucet nose.) I assumed it was an allergy attack. I’ve had “hay fever” my whole life and moving to the west — first Arizona and now Washington State — really reduced the number of attacks I get. But I was working outdoors that day in a dusty environment and I assumed that either pollen — the sagebrush was blooming — or dust had triggered the attack. I walked around with a tissue box, which I brought with me when I went out to dinner with friends. “Just allergies,” I assured them.

But it wasn’t allergies. The symptoms persisted throughout the night and I woke the next morning feeling like crap. Weak, achey, miserable. I realized then that I had a cold and began to panic. I was really looking forward to that Lopez trip and knew how horrible traveling with a cold could be. (It had ruined vacations in Hawai’i and the Bahamas.) I was determined to recover quickly.

Alka Seltzer Cold Medicine
Alka Seltzer Plus is what really helps control my cold symptoms. Keep in mind that no cold medicine “cures” a cold. The best you can hope for is to control symptoms so you can get some rest.

So I spent the whole day in bed, drugged up with whatever cold meds I could find in my medicine cabinet. That was mostly Alka Seltzer cold medicine, which happens to work great for me. Daytime formula during the day and nighttime formula for night. I slept most of that first day, getting up only to feed Penny and the cats, let Penny out a few times, and gather eggs from my chickens. I found some frozen chicken soup in the downstairs freezer and heated it up for lunch and dinner. I had orange juice in the fridge and drank all of it. The whole day went by in a sort of fog. It’s fortunate that my calendar was empty; I would have had to cancel everything on it, including any revenue flights.

The next day, I felt human again. Almost good. I got up and started my day as usual: coffee, catching up on news, etc. I’d planned to take it easy again and did — at least for the first half of the day. I read on the living room sofa. I wasn’t tired enough to nap, so I didn’t.

Later in the afternoon, I ventured outdoors to take care of a few chores. I did more than I expected to do, but I monitored my condition carefully and came inside at any sign of fatigue. My symptoms were controlled by cold medicine and I was okay.

I was very surprised to be feeling fully recovered just a few days later, in time for my trip to Lopez. I thought long and hard about how that quick recovery and I realized that for the first time in my life, I’d done something I’d never done before: surrendered an entire day of my life to a cold.

Could that be the answer to a quick recovery? Just spending a whole day in bed?

I’d read in numerous reliable places that the common cold took 5-7 days to pass. I’ve had colds in the past that have lasted weeks, with lots of suffering every day and even a few doctor visits. Yet the symptoms for mine had come and gone in about 4 days.

Lucky? Maybe.

The November Cold

Unfortunately, I have the opportunity to try to repeat my fast recovery this week.

I flew home from Arizona on Saturday morning and immediately got to work putting out fires (so to speak) at my house. My housesitter had done a good job taking care of things while I was gone and left the house immaculately clean (which I really appreciate) but since I wasn’t expecting the temperatures to dip below freezing while I was gone — hell, it was in the 60s every day right before I left — I didn’t give him instructions for the chickens water. It was frozen and the poor birds had apparently been trying to peck through the ice. So I had to get them set up with their heated water dish for winter. They’d also run out of food — I thought what I’d left them in their feeder would have been enough. They didn’t seem to be suffering at all, so I suspect the situation had been short term. No harm, no foul (no pun intended).

I also had to struggle to deal with a frozen hose (which I’ll need to wait until warmer temperatures to resolve), my mousers running out of dry cat food, and clearing space in my garage for a friend who was bringing his boat over to store for the winter.

So I was running around like a nut all afternoon and most of the next day.

It was on Monday afternoon — notably three days after my commercial airline flight — that those “allergy” symptoms started in. I had just cleaned the chicken’s roost area in the coop and put down some bedding pellets. The pullets were on the perches in there and did a lot of panicked flapping around as I worked. The sneezing and runny nose started within 10 minutes. Damn birds. The dander must have gotten me.

But the symptoms persisted through my dentist visit and the rest of the afternoon. And that evening. By night time, I knew it wasn’t an allergy attack.

Puffs w/Vicks
My #1 choice for tissues when I have a cold is Puffs with Vicks. My mother used to put Vicks VapoRub on our chests when we had colds as kids. I don’t know if it helped, but the smell of Vicks is forever associated in my mind with cold recovery. These tissues are very hard to find in stores.

I got on the nighttime cold medicine before bed. I still had a miserable night, tossing and turning, blowing my nose enough to build a mountain of dirty tissues beside me.

In the morning, I felt super crappy with a headache the size of the migraines I used to get years ago. (Honestly, if nausea had accompanied it, I would have called it a migraine.) After the sun rose, my bedroom, with the lights off, was too bright — even though it was overcast all day. I got up only to let out Penny, give her some food, and take some drugs. I had grapefruit juice in the fridge and drank a bunch of that. I felt too weak to go down and check the garage freezer for more chicken soup. I went back to bed. Penny, obviously sensing that something wasn’t quite right, snuggled up between me and my dirty tissue mountain.

I cancelled my dinner date with a friend and blew off the wine tasting I was supposed to attend afterwards.

I slept most of the day.

Around 3 PM, I got up and made myself something to eat. A salad with sardines. (Don’t knock it; I like sardines.) I cursed myself for packing the balsamic vinegar into my camper (which is waiting for me in Arizona) and not buying a fresh bottle for home. I tore down and discarded my tissue mountain. I let Penny out again and went back to bed. I slept more.

In the evening, woken by that damn headache, I got up to take some more ibuprofen. I let Penny out again. I went into the garage and gave the cats a can of food. I let Penny in. Then I settled in on the sofa with a throw blanket and glass of grapefruit juice to catch up with Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. I felt a little better, but not much. At least I could stay awake.

After about an hour of that, I was exhausted. It was only 7 PM. I surrendered, took some more nighttime cold medicine, and climbed back into bed. I read for about 10 minutes and then fell asleep.

I slept pretty well until about 3 AM. Then I woke up feeling pretty darn good. I hung around in bed, catching up on news via Twitter. (Lots of good news about yesterday’s election. Hooray!) Then, at about 4:30 AM, I decided that my internal clock would just have to stay screwed up for a while and got out of bed to start my day.

With coffee.

I’ll take it easy today, but will get stuff done, mostly indoors. I have a lot of paperwork to catch up on after my two-week trip south. Maybe I’ll finally finish unpacking my books. And I’m sure I’ll take a nap.

My goal is to rest up enough to be completely recovered by Friday. I think it’s possible if I don’t push myself.

Lesson Learned

And that’s the lesson I’ve learned in dealing with these two colds: when a cold strikes, give in to it. Just treat the symptoms with whatever cold meds can help you get rest. Sleep as much as possible. Stay warm and comfortable. Rest, rest, rest.

If it’s just a cold — not the flu — a quicker-than-average recovery might be possible. But not if you push yourself.

And if you’re feeling good right now, go out and get a flu shot. I haven’t gotten mine yet — shame on me — but will definitely get it as soon as I feel 100% recovered from this cold.