Live-blogging the Third Plague
Dec. 2nd, 2022 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootToday in “Branch gets sick so you wear your mask (and distrust your relatives) and hopefully won’t” we are on day three of RSV.
This one is definitely mostly upper respiratory. There’s a minor GI element, but it’s mostly manifesting in my stomach hating the entire world in the sullen way that isn’t active upset but means I can only manage saltines, broth, and white tea. The early threat of diarrhea passed pretty quickly, which is good. (Though I’m pretty pissed off I can’t have green tea right now, actually.)
We have reached the nasty-hacking stage of the festivities ironically known as a “productive cough.” This brings with it a headache, because coughing like that tightens up all the muscles in your neck and at the base of your skull. This is, of course, exacerbated by having to frequently and energetically blow my nose while my sinuses attempt to emulate Niagara Falls. Fun times!
Advice for anyone who has to go out of the house this winter: stock up on kleenex and also your favored salve for a raw nose. Personally, I favor straight-up Vaseline for that. My tiny tub of it is sitting next to my tea right now. There is, alas, nothing to be done for the internal rawness, where your snot-producing glands get really tender, and just breathing kind of hurts up there at the bridge of your nose.
Try really hard not to get this one, kids.
There’s also a persistent brain-haze that goes with this, the kind that sets in when your body has diverted all resources to fire-fighting and left your huge, energy-intensive monkey-brain going “bwuh? there was a thought…” So here I am, stuck on the couch, watching Detective Conan reruns, because I’m in too snappish of a mood for camping anime. Blood and revenge, that’s the ticket.
Further advice, if you can’t avoid this: you’re probably going to need to drug yourself up to get any sleep, and sleep is very important to have. Unless you are one of the people for whom the dosage mix is perfect, I do not recommend Nyquil. You can’t adjust that mix at all, and I, for one, needed to double up on the anti-histamine and the cough suppressant both just to get six hours. Try starting with two painkillers, 60mg of antihistamine, and 30ml of cough suppressant, and adjust from there. Also, warm mist humidifiers are your friend during these trying, snotty, hard-to-breathe times.
This has been today’s live-blogging update, from the land of “wtf, world, really, really?”
This one is definitely mostly upper respiratory. There’s a minor GI element, but it’s mostly manifesting in my stomach hating the entire world in the sullen way that isn’t active upset but means I can only manage saltines, broth, and white tea. The early threat of diarrhea passed pretty quickly, which is good. (Though I’m pretty pissed off I can’t have green tea right now, actually.)
We have reached the nasty-hacking stage of the festivities ironically known as a “productive cough.” This brings with it a headache, because coughing like that tightens up all the muscles in your neck and at the base of your skull. This is, of course, exacerbated by having to frequently and energetically blow my nose while my sinuses attempt to emulate Niagara Falls. Fun times!
Advice for anyone who has to go out of the house this winter: stock up on kleenex and also your favored salve for a raw nose. Personally, I favor straight-up Vaseline for that. My tiny tub of it is sitting next to my tea right now. There is, alas, nothing to be done for the internal rawness, where your snot-producing glands get really tender, and just breathing kind of hurts up there at the bridge of your nose.
Try really hard not to get this one, kids.
There’s also a persistent brain-haze that goes with this, the kind that sets in when your body has diverted all resources to fire-fighting and left your huge, energy-intensive monkey-brain going “bwuh? there was a thought…” So here I am, stuck on the couch, watching Detective Conan reruns, because I’m in too snappish of a mood for camping anime. Blood and revenge, that’s the ticket.
Further advice, if you can’t avoid this: you’re probably going to need to drug yourself up to get any sleep, and sleep is very important to have. Unless you are one of the people for whom the dosage mix is perfect, I do not recommend Nyquil. You can’t adjust that mix at all, and I, for one, needed to double up on the anti-histamine and the cough suppressant both just to get six hours. Try starting with two painkillers, 60mg of antihistamine, and 30ml of cough suppressant, and adjust from there. Also, warm mist humidifiers are your friend during these trying, snotty, hard-to-breathe times.
This has been today’s live-blogging update, from the land of “wtf, world, really, really?”
