Cold Season

The common cold has struck our house.  According to my five-year diary, this seems to be a January kind of a problem.  I thought I would share some thoughts about the common cold, as I’ve realized that my experience with it has changed.  My poor husband is coughing, wheezing, sleeping around the clock, feeling queasy, and generally having a very bad time.  I can tell my immune system is on the prowl, and my energy level is down, but otherwise I’m okay.  This is how it’s been the last three or four times the common cold has blown through.  After being so sick that I coughed up blood one winter, I assumed that respiratory stuff would be rougher on me as I got older.  I was 28 then and I’m 40 now.  Fortunately, my assumption seems to have been incorrect.

There is never going to be a “cure” for the common cold.  I don’t think there will ever be a “cure” for cancer either.  These are two categories where it makes far more sense to focus on prevention and living the healthiest lifestyle possible.  After all, what rational argument is there for not living the healthiest possible lifestyle?  It’s just that common knowledge is not the same as common action.  On the other hand, I don’t think common knowledge includes everything that’s important to know.

These are the factors I think have helped me boost my immune system the most.
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1. Sleep.  Can someone tell me why people are willing to go around being tired every day?  I have struggled with insomnia and parasomnia since I was 7 years old.  For most of my life, it was obvious to me that sound sleep is the most valuable gift anyone can ever receive.  Why would anyone throw that away just to stay up playing games, binge-watching TV, or even reading?  I finally started to get on top of my sleep problems about 5 years ago, and in the last two years, I haven’t had a single episode of night terrors.  The last few times I got sick with anything, it was after traveling and having my sleep schedule disrupted.  Sleep 8-9 hours a night and you will not believe how much better life is.  It’s like upgrading from a motel by a freeway onramp to a five-star luxury suite.
2. Food intake.  I learned last year that the spleen plays an important role in immune function.  The spleen is also sensitive to excessive consumption of fat and sugar.  I always used to be a soda drinker, and I would eat what I now think of as desserts 2-3 times a day.  There are three things I changed about my eating habits that I think play a role. 1. I cut almost all sweets out of my diet, and I haven’t touched soda in years; 2. I quadrupled my consumption of vegetables, focusing on cruciferous vegetables; and 3. I got my weight down to “healthy weight for my height.”  I think the worst part of overeating is that it puts undue strain on all the organs, like shaking a dirty vacuum bag over an air filter or trying to get a pool filter to process river mud.  I suspect that almost all Americans are deficient in at least one key micronutrient, and we don’t think anything of it, because doctors don’t order the available blood tests for micronutrient deficiency (except occasionally vitamin D).
3. Handwashing.  A few years back, I read that absenteeism in school kids was related to how well they washed their hands.  It blew my mind.  I timed myself washing my hands and decided I needed to give it an extra couple of seconds.  I also make a real effort to avoid touching my eyes or nose when I’m out in public, especially at the airport.
4. A clean house.  Hear me out, here.  Four houses back, I was still struggling with my health, sleep issues, fitness level, and weight.  I started having a constant problem with sniffling, wheezing, and sneezing.  My husband and stepdaughter were fine.  I realized there was a disgusting buildup of dust on top of the exposed beams and cabinets in the kitchen and dining room, and it turned out that the area around and under my nightstand was also really icky.  I had never really lived in one home long enough for that to happen before!  I dragged our upright vacuum up a ladder, moved some furniture, and got a Roomba.  The intention was just to have cleaner carpets and less dust for aesthetic reasons.  I noticed, however, that my constant sniffling and sneezing problem DISAPPEARED.  This is part of why we have always tried to find rental houses without carpeting.  I’ve also cut back on home visits in my clutter and squalor consulting work, because I usually have sneezing fits so intense that I have to walk out to the driveway for several minutes at a time.  My lungs burn.  Several times I’ve come home from a job and been sick for a week.  It makes me wonder whether I really picked up a virus or germ, or whether I just inhaled too much particulate matter from these dusty, moldy, cardboard-filled homes.
5. Fitness level.  A functional fitness level is useful in its own right.  I prefer being able to lift my own suitcase into the overhead bin.  Being strong and having a certain amount of solid muscle mass is really helpful when you’re sick enough to feel wobbly and dizzy.  (Dizziness, according to a Kaiser doctor I asked, is a sign of dehydration).  There seems to be something more to it, though.  All the time I’ve spent training to become a marathon runner seems to have made some permanent changes to my body.  My lungs are bigger; my circulation is better; my posture is more upright, opening my chest; my blood sugar is steadier.  Cardio endurance training teaches the body to store glycogen more efficiently.  I also spend considerably more time outdoors in natural light and fresh air.
6. Flu shots.  I finally got my first-ever flu shot last fall.  The reason was that my husband got one at work the year before, and I “never got around to” getting one myself.  In January, I got sick and he didn’t.  Maybe I had the flu, maybe I didn’t, but it finally sold me on the concept.  Now I look at it as a civic duty, a way of protecting vulnerable elderly people, cancer patients, infants, and other fellow citizens.  If I get a tetanus shot, I can’t see why getting a flu shot is any different, and I certainly don’t want to get tetanus.
7. What I don’t do: homeopathy, chicken soup (haven’t eaten chicken soup in nearly 25 years), neti pots, antibacterial soap or hand sanitizers

One thing I noticed over the years when I spent a lot of time on social media was that some of my friends seem to get sick a lot and stay sick for weeks at a time.  The whole family will be down for the count.  I remember when I felt that way.  It seemed that every time I got over a cold or flu, I’d pick something up again a week or two later.  It seemed like what would be a cold for other people would turn into bronchitis for me.  I used to run out of sick days.  When I quit my day job, it was mostly because I realized my rate of sick days had tripled since I started working in that particular building.  I went home and slept 12-15 hours a day for several weeks.  I figured I was just more fragile than other people, a “highly sensitive person” who had never fully gotten over that coughing-up-blood respiratory infection that was ended by an inhaler.  Now I think there are measurable behaviors that make the difference between how often we get sick, how rotten we feel, and how long it takes us to recuperate.

I’m not a doctor.  I may be completely, utterly wrong in all my ideas.  Just because I don’t really get sick anymore doesn’t mean I understand why.  It could be a coincidence.  On the other hand, maybe I’m onto something.  In the last 22 years, I have virtually never had any kind of stomach bug or digestive issue; I’ve thrown up on only four occasions, the last one nearly 7 years ago.  I quit having migraines two years ago.  Now I can say that I don’t really get respiratory bugs, either.  There are no drawbacks that I can think of to washing our hands more thoroughly, getting plenty of sleep, being functionally fit, eating more cruciferous vegetables, cutting sugar and soda, keeping a cleaner house, or being at a healthy weight.  It might even be less expensive to live this way.  Making a complete paradigm shift to a lifestyle that is different at a core level is really challenging for most people, though.  We prefer to stay in our comfort zones even when they aren’t all that comfortable.

I feel a little cruddy as I write this.  My hubby has gone back to bed.  He came home from work early, took a four-hour nap, went to bed early and slept 12 hours, ate breakfast, and now he’s sleeping again.  Leave it to an Upholder like him to be sick over the weekend.  Poor guy.  I’m glad I feel strong enough to cook dinner tonight.  No matter how sick we both get, there are certain things we still do: we still load our dishes in the dishwasher, we still put trash and recycling in their cans, we still eat at the dining table, and we still put our laundry in the hamper.  To our way of thinking, it takes the same amount of time to put a dish in the dishwasher as it does to put it in the sink.  It takes the same amount of time to drop clothes in the hamper as it does to drop them on the floor.  There is always a tail end to a sickness, when we’re trying to get from 70% to 100%, and it’s no fun to try to clean up a disaster area when our energy levels are still low.  Maybe the bathtub doesn’t get scrubbed one week, and that’s fine, because that only means two weeks between cleanings.  Being sick is one of many times when it pays to live an orderly life the rest of the year.

I hope I’ve presented some ideas that may be helpful.  The common cold is something we all understand, one of those annoyances that should help us feel compassionate toward one another.  One way to demonstrate that compassion is to hole up at home when we suspect we’re contagious.  We can also demonstrate compassion toward ourselves.  We can take care of ourselves, treat our bodies as well as we know how, and try to avoid bummers like a cold.

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