Doing What I Can (Blog #264)

Last night I started getting sick again. I can’t tell you how exhausting this is. In bed before midnight, I spent most the night sweating. I’m not sweating now, so Dad said it could have been the heater in the waterbed “acting up.” I plan to have a stern talking to it later on. Anyway, I’ve spent most the day generally worn out, coughing up junk, and nursing a mildly sore throat. I keep telling myself it could be worse. It could be worse, Marcus. It could be worse.

Could it, Also Marcus. Could it really?

Thinking this could be sinus related (since everything with me is sinus related), I ventured out of the house earlier to the Asian food market in search of more Kimchi to swab in my nostrils. I ran out of Kimchi last week and had gotten some from Walmart, but Dad says it’s not the same thing. (I’m not sure how he knows this.) Y’all, the Asian food market has a giant nativity scene set up right by the entrance. This is something I’ve never seen before–the virgin birth inside a local grocery store. Personally, I was disappointed that the baby Jesus wasn’t actually Asian, but talk about one-stop shopping–soy sauce, salvation for the world, and twenty-pound bags of rice all on the same aisle.

I always feel slightly conspicuous when I shop at the Asian food market, like I don’t really belong there because I’m white. Today the woman at the checkout station was wearing rubber gloves as if she were a dentist or surgeon, someone with a medical degree. If I were to ask her about the gloves, I’m sure she’d say they were a sanitary measure, but I thought, You’re not fooling anyone, lady. You’re no doctor. Well, apparently I’m no doctor either, since when the total came to $8.36, I only handed the lady $8.00. (I could have sworn it was $9.00, but hey–my brain is full of snot.) Then the language barrier thing happened, her asking for 36 cents to complete the sale, and me thinking she just wanted the change to make her life easier, like she was gonna give me a dollar back.

“But I don’t HAVE 36 cents,” I said.

She kept pointing at the screen where the total was, then, almost as an afterthought, showed me the one five and three one-dollar bills I’d handed her. Well crap, I said to myself. Convinced she thought I was a stupid American, I apologized as I handed her another dollar, which she gladly took with her rubber-glove-covered hand. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t get out of the store fast enough. I didn’t even slow down to tell Mary and Joseph how neat and tidy I thought the manger was. Maybe next time I see them I can say, “You’ve really cleaned this place up. It’s just, well, immaculate.”

When I got home and did the kimchi treatment, Dad suggested that I take a Mucinex, something I haven’t tried since this whole sinus disaster started a couple months ago. I mean, it’s not that I haven’t considered it, but when I used Mucinex a year ago, it made my heart race. Of course, that was the extra strength and this was the regular strength, so I ended up saying, “What the hell” and popping the pill. As the Mucinex commercial says, “Let’s end this.”

Now it’s been two hours, and I’m ready to go back to bed. Since I have a dance lesson to teach later, that’s probably not going to happen, but maybe that means I’ll sleep even better tonight. When I woke up sick today, I really wanted to get frustrated and throw a tantrum. You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. This again? But I’m really trying to be more patient than that. More than anything else, I’m trying to be more compassionate than that, to realize that my body is obviously having a hard time here. I guess this is how life goes–some days you wake up well, some days you wake up sick. Hell, some days you walk through a nativity scene in an Asian food market, so let’s stop pretending anything makes sense on this planet, simply take things a day at a time, and do what we can with the day we’ve been given.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

"When you’re authentic, your authenticity is enough. You don’t need to compare."

In Search of Flaxseed and Hope (Blog #241)

Last night I went to Walmart for a bag of flaxseed and honestly spent thirty minutes looking for it. Since I did three full laps up and down every aisle and still didn’t have a bag of flaxseed in my hands, I can only imagine I looked like someone who was there strictly for the exercise. Eventually I thought to use the Walmart phone app, which tells you what aisle items are on if they’re in stock. Well, of course it was in stock–on the nut aisle. I’d walked past it three times. Can we say, “not observant”?

So sue me–I never claimed to be Columbo.

On the way to checkout, I saw a sign in the women’s clothing department for a company called NOBO, which apparently stands for No Boundaries. I didn’t look at any of their products, but I can only assume they think having no boundaries is a good thing. Who knows–maybe they make stretch pants. (Their slogan could be, “There’s no place we won’t go.”) But all I could think was, This is a terrible name for a company. Boundaries are a good thing. Boundaries are the holy grail! (My therapist said so.) I actually thought about screaming this right there next to the panties, bras, and girdles, but decided to just blog about it instead.

Last night I started taking a hundred and one vitamins to help boost my immune system and (hopefully) get rid of my six-week sinus infection, and this afternoon I woke up feeling just as bad as ever. My friend Margo commented on Facebook that I needed to give the vitamins a chance, that my level of patience was obviously nonexistent. I don’t disagree with her assessment, but I just want to feel better–now. Honestly, I think it would do us all a world of good–I’m sick of blogging about this, and I can only imagine you’re sick of reading about it.

Tomorrow I have to get up early for therapy. Determined to get some rest, I told myself I was going to blog this afternoon and get it over with. Currently it’s 11:15 PM, so that obviously didn’t happen. Still, this start time is a lot better than my usual two in the morning. With any luck, I’ll be in bed in no time. But the point is I got distracted this afternoon because I started reading more about sinus infections on the internet. (Well, in people’s noses, but you understand.) Surprisingly, I found a website I’ve never heard of before, and it contained some information that may help me kick this thing in the butt.

The plot thickens. (Like my mucus.)

The website (and some others I found) basically said that many people who suffer from chronic sinus infections are missing a bacteria in their sinuses, specifically, L. sakei. It also said that the biome of bacteria in our sinuses is different from the one in our stomachs, so even if most probiotics included L. sakei (which they don’t), it wouldn’t help to take them. Rather, one needs to introduce the bacteria into their nose directly. Oh good, I thought, I have a finger. Now, where can I find this stuff?

As it turns out, L. sakei by itself is hard to come by, although it is used in meat-packing and sold by a company in New Zealand. However–and this is where it gets interesting–it’s often (but not always) found in kimchi, the Korean superfood that’s basically fermented cabbage. That’s right, people on the internet say you can actually heal a sinus infection by rubbing kimchi juice on the insides of your nostrils “like a really messy eater.” The idea is that once it’s in your nose, the new bacteria will grow, kill the bad bacteria, and give you your freaking life back.

Well I’ll try anything once. I mean, so far I’ve put baby shampoo and hydrogen peroxide up my nose–what’s a little food juice? Honestly, of all the things I’ve read on the internet about sinus infections, the idea that my body is missing an important bacteria makes the most sense. I’m not a scientist, but why else would my body have such a problem fighting this infection when everything else is working?

With this logic in mind, I set out this evening in search of any and all kimchi I could find. I quickly discovered that Walmart only carries one brand of kimchi, and since it wasn’t one of the ones listed on the website and I like to follow rules, I ended up going to three–three–Asian markets. Y’all, Asian markets are really fascinating. First, I felt super tall because the shelves were lower than what I’m used to. Second, I’ve never seen so much soy sauce in all my life. Lastly, there were dead fish up and down every aisle (basically just lying around like decoration), and since they had eyeballs, I felt extremely conspicuous. But I digress. I ended up with two different brands of kimchi. Neither of them were on the list either, and neither of them had a “manufactured on” date (which is good to know because L. sakei doesn’t show up in the fermentation process right away), but I decided I was doing the best I could.

So far I’ve rubbed the kimchi juice in my nostrils twice. Currently I’m still coughing and tired, but I’m not worn out like I was this afternoon. Maybe it’s the kimchi–maybe it’s the vitamins or simply taking a shower and getting out of the house–but I do think I feel better. At the very least I feel optimistic. I read a lot of stories this afternoon about people just like me who have suffered for a long time, and it’s reassuring to know that something eventually worked for them. As I think about it now, maybe I am like Columbo, doing all this detective work, digging around the internet in search of crazy solutions that, like the clothes at Walmart, have no boundaries. (Don’t throw those leftovers away, you can put them up your nose!) And whereas I’ll have to get back to you on whether or not I actually found a solution today, I can say that I found some hope, and that’s no small thing. So to anyone in search of flaxseed or hope–whatever you do–do stop looking until you find it.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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We think of hope as something pristine, but hope is haggard like we are.

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