COVID-19 Chronicles: Advice

Off my meds, as they say, although in this case it’s just acetaminophen and Mucinex. Suddenly occurred to me that I should quit taking them

Sudden insight, because I’ve been thinking a lot about pharma lately

Also the question of how we decide who to trust and how we treat our illnesses

If you get so much as a paper cut or the hiccups, you can believe that 100,000 people will give you 240,000 pieces of advice about what to do

Food, exercise, and medicine are our era’s secular religion

Most people’s attitude toward research and news reportage on health matters is:

“First they said eggs are bad for you, then they’re good for you again, who do you believe”

Emerging research over the course of a century somehow comes across as uncertainty

I don’t know about eggs (haven’t eaten one since 1997) but I do know one thing that’s bad for you, and that’s coronavirus

Here’s the thing about sharing details of my illness and recovery

Anything I say can be made to look different ways depending on one’s perspective

There are three factors:

1. I got sick
2. I had some symptoms but not others
3. I got better without going to the hospital

Say I tell everyone, I ate broccoli a lot while I was sick (true)

Then the obvious responses would be

1. Didn’t prevent you from getting sick, I hate broccoli, disregard
2. Seems irrelevant
3. Eating broccoli clearly kept you from being hospitalized, get me some

With each additional input, the case is made more intricate

My personal beliefs should not influence you, because as I have said before I am not a doctor

Conclusions I might make about my own case history may be false

Correlation is not causation, but beyond that, I may read something completely the wrong way

I’m pretty solid that taking acetaminophen was a good idea, doctor’s orders, I did not get deep muscle aches or a fever like other people who had COVID, also seems to have helped me sleep

On the other hand, there are rare incidences of people who have an allergic response to this common drug, put my friend in the hospital with anaphylaxis several years ago

This is why it is never okay for anyone to tell someone else “YOU SHOULD” take whatever

Other examples, megadoses of vitamin C can interfere with oral birth control

Likewise oral birth control can make caffeine stay in your system twice as long

Without knowing the full picture of substances that someone is taking, it’s simply a terrible idea for an untrained layperson to tell other people which pills to take, could kill them

I have a friend who went to a conference a few months ago, came back in the MLM wanting to sell “supplements”

This comes up ALL THE TIME in my world (public speaking, fitness, entrepreneurs) and I have one of three responses

I only take health advice from people who are healthier than me (sort of moot now that I have COVID, almost everyone in the galaxy is healthier than me right now)

People who take a daily multivitamin have higher mortality from all causes (means they are more likely to die for *some* reason, not sure what, again moot point)

“Supplements” consistently lab test to not have the ingredients that they claim on the label, also wildly inconsistent amounts

Anyway, the friend who was trying to pitch me on MLM vitamins only two months ago just so happens to have been at Virus Brunch with me

Lucky girl, in quarantine with a big box of these fancy special vitamins!!!

She isn’t talking about them at all any more

Since she’s been sick for an entire month, still has vertigo, brain fog, and headaches

Did they help?

Hardcore salesperson would say YES, of course they did, she lived, kept her out of the hospital right?

This is called “motivated reasoning”

After you have stared your own death in the face for several days, it changes your relationship with motivated reasoning

Perhaps could make a sincere religious convert out of someone

Or convince them to finally quit vaping

In my case, it has made me much more serious about reading my health information from medical journal abstracts

A lot of people have given me specific health advice while I have been sick with coronavirus

Including:

Drink celery juice

Long list of Indian herbs

Megadoses of vitamin D (please cite source, this I would consider)

Lie on stomach (did this, makes lower back stiff but actually helped my lungs)

Do not take ibuprofen (had heard this from news, thank you)

Vitamin C supplements (literally drank some within an hour of being exposed)

Drink hot tea, it will wash the virus into your stomach (and possibly IT DID, do not advise, that was a rough day, not that I plan to give up drinking tea)

Not a single one of these people have any medical training, nor have they had coronavirus themselves, nor has anyone in their families

What makes people so convinced that they know these “treatments” will work?

How would someone know which ones to take seriously and which not?

One of the hardest things about COVID-19 is that it makes it really hard to think clearly even on a good day, some of you talk about “baby brain” and it is similar, but much worse

I had trouble even tracking which pill packets to open, even when something was in a totally different size and color of box with a different shape and color of pill

Could be dangerous

Could be fatal

So here’s the deal, I had the sudden insight that the Mucinex might have been contributing to my breathing difficulties

Here I had been feeling confident for two weeks that it prevented me from developing a cough, which was great, it prevents mucus from building up in the lungs, could have kept me out of the hospital

But I took it on my own recommendation, not doctor’s orders, not in the news, nobody is talking about it

And I did have a couple of days of serious difficulties breathing

SO WHICH IS IT?

Did it save my life or did it almost suffocate me?

Or both, depending on which day during the illness?

I didn’t take it that night

Then I read an article describing the yellow creeping crud that builds up in the lungs of COVID patients, how what seems to be happening is not a pneumonia, not a respiration problem at all, but rather an oxygenation problem like carbon monoxide poisoning

OHHHHH

After I read the article I had totally renewed faith in the Mucinex

Thought that maybe if I had taken the 1200 instead of the 600 dose I might have fared better

But I CAN’T KNOW

Because I am a sample size of one

Anecdote

I can’t even test my own blood pressure, much less blood oxygenation, lung scan, chest x-ray, no microscope, anything like that at all

My personal experience could confirm either conclusion

Or it could be that it didn’t even have any effect on me at all and that I got better in the same amount of time it would have taken without the pills

This is why we trust research, or at least why I do

In the morning, after a night of no pills, I had vertigo again, first time in a week

Now, I had quit taking both the Tylenol and the Mucinex

So even if I trust only my own intuition, how do I know, was it one, the other, combination of both, or random coincidence?

Since I also had vertigo while on both pills two weeks ago

You can see where this is going

Guesswork is how people decide on their own that they’re gluten-intolerant when what they really have is an allergy to yeast, etc etc

Self-diagnosis is proved wrong over and over and over and over and over again

One of the silver linings that may come out of this pandemic is for people to lose patience with quackery and sketchy folk remedies and start trusting in clinically tested results again

In the meantime I’m happy to report that I’ve crawled out of the hole, a week ago i would say I was at a 2/10 and now I am back up to a 6/10

Looks like I’m going to make it, and for the record, no I didn’t drink any celery juice, not even once