Don’t Leave it to the Experts
Having spent nearly two solid months battling a virus, I’ve learned a lot about remedies. I tried herbal concoctions that made my throat burn and left me nauseated, but still I coughed like crazy. I took vitamins, I drank tons of green tea and lemon. Yes, I tried chicken soup, too! Over the counter meds didn’t touch it. And as it got worse, I consulted with “experts” about what to do.
One doctor gave me an antibiotic and told me to take Mucinex. Two weeks later I was even worse, and the doctor changed the antibiotic. Still coughing and miserable, a few days later I ended up in the ER with a bronchial spasm that scared me into even more grey hair than I have now. I was beginning to think I might not survive the virus. The doctor at the hospital gave me a chest x-ray, prednisone to take with the antibiotic, plus an inhaler like asthma patients use. Acute bronchitis was the diagnosis.
$1200 later the cough was better, but the congestion persisted, and I was now battling with yeast from the antibiotic and cold sweats, headaches, and noise sensitivity from the prednisone. I began once more to do what I had started with: herbs and water and vitamins…and sleep whenever my body said to! I began day by day to get stronger and feel better. I learned that when it comes to illness, it’s really a guessing game about what will work, you try this and see, if it doesn’t help, try that. A virus will NOT respond to an antibiotic, it just runs its course no matter what. If your immune system is strong, it can fight it off early, and if not, you battle for a longer time. The virus got hold of me when I was already run down from caring for family members who had it, and that’s why it took so long to get well.
I thought about this when I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Remember Noah’s ark was built by amateurs, but the Titanic was built by professionals.” In the long run, I could have saved time and money by following what my years of studying health and natural therapies was telling me, instead of putting my health in the hands of “experts.” Every time I pull into that parking lot on South Locust Street, I think of this. Experts designed a parking lot so convoluted that you can only easily pull into the lot from ONE direction, and half the time you hold your breath while driving through to (hopefully) find a parking space lest you risk scraping along the bumper of some car sticking out too far into the lot. They took away almost all the on-street parking that had worked for years, and gave us the same number of spaces in a lot that is difficult to navigate and frustrating to use.
