Category Archives: doing it wrong

Usually when I get sick the only thing I take is a pain reliever, if needed, and I do a dose of cough syrup before bed. Otherwise it’s tea and Fisherman’s Friend. I think Tante Irmgard introduced me to FF and it is the only cough lozenge going. Might not taste great but it works. Ricola is pretty good, too, but it’s more like candy and if I eat too many I get a stomach ache.

But my new remedy that I tried for the first time this year is Theraflu which I recommend with reservations. I bought it several months ago because I felt a little off and I was going on a trip and thought it might get me through the day if I went down hard. Luckily, we didn’t need it on the trip.

But I tried it over the weekend when I felt so awful and it was pretty good. For those of you unfamiliar, Theraflu is a powder and you add hot water. I only did a half envelope at a time. It tastes like lemonade made with Pez and battery acid and it did revive me, so recommend if you have a gruesome cold especially if you have to function out in the world. However.

First of all, I know for some people, anti-histamines make them sleepy. For me it keeps me awake. When I did the Theraflu, even early in the day, I had a hard time sleeping at night.

Second, I think it disrupted the whole having a cold process. I’m not a doctor or a scientist but I took biology in high school several decades ago. Here’s how it works. When your body gets a cold all available stations get down to business producing as much snot as quickly as possible to distribute to any area remotely involved in the respiratory system.

Then you come along with your Theraflu and the body’s control center tells everyone: knock it off with the snot making. And the body is like, “What? But I like making snot, I have all the materials here to make tons and tons. I want to make snot.” But the control center says, “Hard cheese, you can just hang out and prep your station. You make snot when I say so. This is temporary.”

So all the snot making systems of the body are tense in readiness for the word they can go back to work. And there you are, thinking you are getting better and the crud will be behind you soon.

Then the Theraflu wears off, the control center hits the button telling everyone they can get back to work. Now your body catches up on the last 4-5 hours of snot making and you are flooded so quickly you’re not even sure what’s happening.

At one point I was doubled over coughing so hard I put my hands over my eyes, partly because I didn’t want my eyeballs to pop out and partly because I didn’t want to see my spleen that I’d just gorked up sitting on the floor with all the used tissues.

Cough remains. We went to the store last night and bought 6 more packets of FF and 4 boxes of tissues. Also a giant basket of food because we ate everything we had even all my emergency meals I had stashed. All we had left was garden burgers and mustard.

A couple of years ago we were hiking in the woods and my sister said she was going to go hug a fatty. I thought maybe it was a euphemism (for?) but nope, she needed to hug a giant tree.

Unlike most people, I hate taking my car in for service.

Just kidding, is there anyone that says, “Yay! It’s time to take the car in.”

The service place is conveniently located as long as I do some planning so I figured out a scheme where I could drop the car off, take the train into work and then pick up the car later and meet a friend (and not have to drive home at rush hour). The plan worked perfectly.

One of the things I asked them to do is replace the windshield wipers.

One morning there was mist on the windshield and when I fired up the wipers, they seemed not quite right. They scraped the mist off but they sort-of stuttered along the windshield and I would say smeared more than wiped. Since I did not want to come up with another scheme so I could return to the service place, I decided that maybe they needed to break in and perhaps there wasn’t enough moisture.

A week later: mist, stutter, smear.

I called and they said bring it in whenever I could.

I really didn’t want to drop everything to do it right away. However, I didn’t see many days in the near future where it would be more convenient and I didn’t want to get stuck in the rain and be crossing my fingers since I couldn’t see.

The next morning I sat in the car, watching the wipers clear the mist and I was uncertain. Was there really a problem or was I being a fussy old lady? It wasn’t like they were a complete failure, just not my usual experience with brand new wipers.

I decided to ease my mind and take it in. A very nice young man helped me and he was patient, but in placating way. He said they were definitely new and he cleaned them off. Then he sat in the car and did a few rounds of the wiper fluid and also seemed uncertain. He said he would go ahead and replace the parts.

He returned from parts with another guy who took one look and said: they’re on backwards. The left and right were swapped.

They went ahead and replaced the parts anyway and even though I was annoyed that they screwed up and I had to make a special trip, I was also relieved that the problem was real and not just fussy old lady syndrome.