By the way, I hate being sick

[womzilla]

And I truly do wish it would stop now. I've had what I think is the worst cold of my life for the last six days--actually, given that the first indication I had that I was getting sick was waking up at 3 AM last Wednesday with my eyes crusted shut with goop, I guess I just celebrated the one-week anniversary about half an hour ago. Mild fever and hence only a moderate case of what I call "febrile thoughtjunk", not much in the way of muscle aches or chills, so it's clear that it was a cold rather than The Influence, but man, I have coughed up or snorted out more mucus in the past 168 hours than an entire convention of chain smokers waking up from a hangover.

(Early in the cold, nellorat and I decided that "Smokey Lungmucus" sounded like an early Ren and Stimpy character.)

I actually had my worst case of febrile ideation this evening; I spent over an hour chasing ideas barely the far side of coherent in which the house, the universe, my body, and storytelling were all parts of elaborate three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles told in an Irish accent. Fascinating stuff, but not particularly fun to live through.

I missed three full days of work, the first time I've ever done that for anything short of surgery; my voice is strained; I'm not sleeping well, as indicated by the fact that I'm posting at 3:30 AM on a work night. And it scares the hell out of me that I thought I might have bacterial conjunctivitis--treatable, but highly contagious and possibly seriously damaging--and still couldn't manage to get a doctor's appointment in less than 48 hours. Good thing we don't have socialized medicine here in the USA or I might not have access to necessary health care with reasonable speed.

Well. My overnight dose of placebo*--err, cough medicine--is kicking in, and I suspect I can get back to sleep for the four hours remaining until I have to get up for work.

(* I'm very annoyed that just as my cold was beginning, a major article was published in Chest Journal indicating that over-the-counter cough medicines "don't really work", but the coverage was contradictory. From the mainstream press reports, it appears that the key medicines involved--antihistamines, expectorants, and cough suppressants--do actually "work" but the dosages in most OTC formulations are inadequate. But the actual article with, you know, FACTS isn't available anywhere online.)

Comments

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

Odd, i was able to find the actual study on the Cough Suppresant activity fairly quickly. Turns out they developed a machine to automatically measure coughs for the study, which is cool.

http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/full/120/4/1121?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=cold+medicine+OTC&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1137621602096_12413&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=1&journalcode=chest

And, the kicker: the actual effect of Dextromethorphan:
http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content-nw/full/120/4/1121/T4
About 1/8 fewer coughs, most of the time, the only high p is the intensity, about 5% less.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Looks like that's a study from 2001. Still cool.