Dear friends,
After catching up on my sleep from the Belgium trip, I felt absolutely wonderful. I went bouncing around for a few days, unable to contain my joy at being home and my sense of well-being.
All good things come to an end. Which is to say that I've been down for the count with a bad cold starting Friday morning. Yesterday it was at its worst. Today I can breathe without struggle, which is an improvement, but tomorrow we'll probably be on to the coughing stage. I resent in excelsis the fact that suddenly in the last two years exceedingly minor illnesses like colds are a big deal. I used to be much tougher than this. What's going on? (It couldn't be that I'm getting older? Could it?)
During this time I've kept up with W4 and with reading Secondhand Smoke (now a First Things blog). If you don't regularly read Secondhand Smoke and are interested in life issues, especially stem-cell research, euthanasia, and suicide, you should. I can't recommend it too highly. My only mild gripe is that Wesley tries to avoid posting much on the subject of abortion, though he does occasionally post on it, especially on late-term abortion and infanticide, and he even had one post arguing that human life begins at conception. I could conjecture the reasons for this reticence but won't. But don't let that put you off. It's an essential blog for information on issues that should be of concern to all men of good will.
Oh, and a Happy Father's Day to all the fathers in readerland. We have tried to give Esteemed Husband a happy father's day here, as well.
Signing off...
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8 comments:
"It couldn't be that I'm getting older? Could it?"
Oh no, of course not.
"I could conjecture the reasons for this reticence but won't."
Please, feel free.
Oh. I hope you feel better real soon.
"It couldn't be that I'm getting older? Could it?"
Oh, perish the thought! The bugs are getting more virulent, that's all, and then there's the weather [or so I tell myself as I "recuperate" from a URI that assaulted me a couple of months or so ago].
I hope you feel much, much better any minute now!
I really want to go with that 'more virulent' theory. I really, really do. Except I see my daughter and the people around me in their teens and twenties recover in a few days from the exact same illness I take two weeks to get rid of.
Yeah, the "more virulent" thing just won't seem to work. Even Tim wasn't hit too hard with this one, except for just one evening when he felt wretched. So it was just me that really got it.
However, I have discovered two new treatments this time around: 1) Over-the-counter sleeping pills for breathing difficulties. This was a real surprise. I just took the sleeping aid to help me sleep despite the discomfort of a stuffy nose and painful chest. I was actually a little worried that maybe it was a bad idea to be trying to sleep deeply when I was wheezing and all. I thought maybe it would make me not know it if I needed to wake up to breathe or something! But apparently the OTC sleeping pills are antihistamine-based. I already take an allergy pill every day, but this extra antihistamine about 10 p.m. worked wonders. My breathing eased, including the chest, and I was able to sleep. I'm going to remember that, because that feeling like you can hardly breathe at all gets kind of scary. 2) A small amount of wine as cough medicine. Need I say more? :-)
I'll have to try the 'small amount' thing. That's *less* than half a bottle, yes?
Oh, I'm sure the amount is patient-specific. You should know that after one glass of wine I pretty much fall asleep. This explains why I never drink a glass of wine when I'm out to dinner anywhere. I don't want to wake up with my face in the fettucine alfredo. So for the cough medicine, we're talking for me something on the order of 1/3 cup. But it might take more for your cough. :-)
What brand sleeping pills?
Generic. They are the store brand of the local pharmacy, and they say "Sleep Aid" on the label. I can handle only 1/2 of one, so I have somebody with stronger fingers break one in half or even break off something like a third. Even so, they make me pretty sleepy.
Didn't work in Europe, though, or not very well, because my hypothalmus was yelling, "Don't you try to tell _me_ what time it is! I know what time it is! It's 4 in the afternoon, and whaddaya mean, it's bedtime??"
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