A Life of Plague and Pestilence

Good times in our house. Todd is still battling his sinus congestion-y mess of a cold. He’s been downing Sudafed and Tylenol cocktails, while honking his schnoz into those tissues that are laced with Vicks. Then he ended up rubbing his eyes after handling the tissues that are laced with Vicks: “Youch! Dammit!”

Yesterday I was taken down by the overwhelming urge to hurl my guts out. The overwhelming hurl urge is still with me today, and I’ve barely eaten yesterday and today.

You know I am sick when I don’t want to eat. I eat frequently throughout the day, and often get grouchy after not eating for about 3-4 hours. Todd, ever observant excellent husband, knows that my grouchiness can only be appeased with something in cookie or bar form. He’s gotten to the point where he will stash granola bars in his pockets when we were working on the boat and it’s not quite time for lunch yet. He recognizes the symptoms of empty belly grouchiness, usually in the form of cussing like a sailor--loudly and with abandon--throwing my tools around, and bitching to myself about whatever injustice I’d encountered in the last five minutes. At this point he’ll place the granola bar in reaching distance for me, gently nudging it with something long so he can keep all his fingers.

Not only do I not want to eat anything today and am feeling all around yucky, I woke up yesterday with a gigantic zit on my chin, and today I woke up with that all too familiar painful tingle on my bottom lip. Yep, cold sore. Great. Just what I need. Not only am I nauseous, but now I get to put foul tasting goo on my mouth, you know, just what a nauseated girl needs.

I’ve been going through my mental rolodex of cold sore cures. I can’t be bothered to go to the Walgreens to get a bottle of L-Lysine, because I am nauseated at the thought of being vertical at this point. I have a tube of Abreva in the medicine cabinet that never seems to work as well as the ads say it will, but of course I’ve been smearing that all over my lip every .3 seconds.

A few years ago I was complaining to a friend about a cold sore that just would not go away. “I have just the thing,” she said. “But it’s kinda gross.”

“I don’t care!” I screeched. “I’ll do anything at this point. Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! Just fricken tell me! Come on!” I groaned.

“OK, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. You know, of it’s grossness,” she sighed.

“Come on! I am dying here!”

“OK, the ultimate cold sore cure is pee.”

“Pee? Like pee? Urine?” I asked, instantly sorry that she’d told me about the expanding usefulness of urine.

“Yeah. Pee. Urine.”

“Ugh, that is so gross. Please tell me you didn’t put pee on your mouth,” I shuddered, completely skeeved out at the thought.

“OK, I won’t tell you that.”

I haven’t yet gotten that desperate, that I’ll put pee on my mouth. But in a fit of desperation during another agonizing cold sore I scoured the Internet for the ultimate cure. You know, because everything on the Internet is true. I came across many accounts of people putting nail polish remover on cold sores.

So I tried it. As weird as it sounds, though not as weird as putting pee on a cold sore, it actually works. Sort of. It makes that irritating cold sore tingle go away, which is nice. It doesn’t do much for the nausea, however.