I be illin'

Three colds in one season? That’s a some sort of a record for me, and not a good one.

Cold #3 landed on Monday and it’s a doosey. Normally my colds are dwindling after a day or two but here we are on day three and this one seems to be settling in for the long run. That does not please me.

I’m very busy (and arguably stupid) so I’ve been going into the office. Short of staying home to recuperate I’ve been doing what I can to reduce the time I spend in abject misery (read: whining and playing the martyr).

Being who I am, my intended road to wellness is lined with food. I’m not a fan of the new fads of nutraceuticals or functional foods but I do believe that old wives didn’t get that way (old, not wives) by being complete fools.

The dinner of choice this week has been soup. Sure, it would be better if there were someone around to make my soup for me but , well, there’s not. So my soup has to be easy enough for me to make while spending most of my time curled up on the couch being pathetic and wishing my cat had opposable thumbs (and the desire to help out).

This isn’t just any soup, but soup made from homemade chicken stock. A quart of stock is simmered for about thirty minutes until it reduces to two cups. I’ve done this four times in the past three days and my favorite version involves adding strips of fresh ginger and a few cloves of crushed garlic to the stock at the start of simmering. When the stock is reduced the ginger and garlic are strained out and the stock is poured over finely diced tofu. Add a little soy sauce and you’re ready to eat. The ginger gives it a serious kick which can cut through even my gooey stuffy sinuses.

Another culinary tactic has been a kind of hot toddy. The lemon fairy visited a week ago, leaving a bag of meyer lemons on my front doorstep. They’ve come in very handy for my mock toddies. These have been made using the juice of two lemons and a large spoonful of manuka honey (a gift from friends who went to New Zealand last year) topped off with boiling water. Don’t make that face. It’s good. OK, maybe I think it’s good because I can actually taste the lemon in there but, hey, take it where you can get it.

Other approaches I’ve been taking are ibuprofen (I ache; oy, do I ache), an abundance of couch time when I’m at home and an early bedtime.

How are all these approaches working? Um, well, could be better. Of course it’s impossible to tell how I’d feel without these things but I know how I feel with them and that’s bad enough for me. In truth I’m not convinced that anything can reduce the symptoms or duration of a cold, so even if my self-prescribed method doesn’t help at least it tastes a helluva lot better than over the counter cold medicine (which never works for me).

Hopefully today is the last grand hurrah for this nasty little bug since I’m out of lemons, ginger and homemade chicken stock. Besides, this sickness thing is getting old. Been there, done that, ready to move on now.