Chapter IV Page 1

If during the course of a cold you feel well rested and your flame is around catering, and you are in the mood, why not? Threats of any kind would not be imposed on the establishment nor would it cause the human race any harm. Let the virus revel in triumph for a day or two. It may even be medically justified if the temptation endures and keeps interfering with your sleep.

In regard to your immediate family, insist on the exercise of the method even if they think you are a lunatic. That’s what my wife thought I was at the be-ginning. If I force-dropped vitamin C solution in our child’s nose, it had to be done when she was not around. Her response to my confession always came with the accusation that my treatment of the child would shame a fiend.

But her anger always subsided after she saw the quick improvement of the child’s condition. Now she is a practitioner of the method herself. My ninety-one-year-old mother, with quick injections of vitamin C and gamma globulin shots became immune.

At the onset, I repeat, the VC wash gives you time till you reach someone who could give you the injections. For old people the VC wash is not mandatory if the wash, with its temporal discomfort, is too much for the old person.

When feeling not clean, by all means, take a bath. But not the type that would strain you. Don’t sit in a hot tub for a half-hour. Don’t shower with very hot water so your body sweats afterward to get rid of the excess heat. That is strain.

Take a short shower with lukewarm water and shampoo you hair, too, if you have an electric hair-dryer. Make your hair absolute dry after washing. Make sure your room is warm put on fresh, dry underwear and pajamas, go to bed, and cover your self to the chin. Put on a home head wear of any kind if you have it, but take it off as soon as you feel your head is about to sweat.

Taking a shower as described makes your skin breathe and on the whole makes you feel good. Taking a bath during a cold is good, provided you don’t go around doing house-chores.

Now, as I said before, after the treatment, don’t eat or drink anything cold. Eat only nutritious foods.

For anyone recovering from a cold, and for those practitioners of the method who have stopped the cold at the onset, this instruction has one flaw: Because you don’t have the feeling you had a bout with the cold, rarely will you re-member to take the proper care. Some-body shoves a drink into your hand with ice, and you take a couple of gulps before remembering your condition.

You take an apple out of the refrigerator and unknowingly start biting. Unless you are one of those health fanatics, who, in good health, can look at a cold apple for a half-hour because the chill in it is bad for teeth, you are bound to make the mistake of eating the cold apple. Or you will finish your drink and soon feel a wrinkly feeling at the base of your throat.

With short coughs you keep clearing your throat, but the coarse, uneven sensation doesn’t go away. To correct that feeling you drink something warm, a hot tea or coffee, but the same, ill-omened sensation remains. The virus, with a changed structure and personality, has come to new hospitable territory, the upper respiratory tract and eventually the lower one: your lungs.

You have to act fast again, other-wise your lungs will become congested, and might churn our phlegm for the rest of the winter. This would be more at the beginning and less later on, but it will take you along time to be rid of it.

You must have the right antibiotic ready in the medicine cabinet. Ampicillin of 500 mg strength would do well. Before you reach your doctor, begin taking the antibiotics, one capsule every eight hours.

Also take and expectorant before your lungs become phlegmatic, other-wise, until warm weather comes, you will go around bringing up phlegm with a sudden short cough in the most un-expected place or situation. Sometimes you may be forced to drop it on the sidewalk when no one is looking.

But, of course, you wouldn’t do a thing like that. You are different, Tammy. You belong to a worldwide sect called the beautiful people in your country. That makes you special. The beautiful are the ones different, not the rich.

Now you are rich and no doubt still beautiful – I hope you remain that way ever – but beware that the All-knowing at times plays rough games with his chosen children.

Give a mind to this: the great Iranian painter Kamalelmolk became blind in old age, Beethoven became deaf, and the late billionaire Paul Getty got dyspepsia. Could calamities so devastatingly ironic be holy jokes?

Or, could we surmise that all are acts of holy balance? God gives, God takes. One really can’t figure these things out without a sense of religious-ness. Why is it that those so lavishly blessed with talent die early? They expire, because in the time of their lives they have to burn bright. Longevity is not luck; talent is.

It remains in the universal order of things that when God takes, ample compensation already has been given.

Beethoven’s “Symphony Number Nine” is the closest thing to God singing music to his children. What if the chosen source were stars in heaven, becoming comets while they sang it together? Of what importance, that at the end of a shiny trail, however short, is extinction?

So what if with equal irony, you being now a successful designer of fashion end up in old age in rags, not of pecuniary reason, but by an aberration of concepts and ideas? Am I putting you in the category of those mentioned so that a likely loss of reasoning may counter-balance your success?

Not at all. Let’s say I am giving you the scare just because you haven’t returned my call. The phone in my room is unreasonably silent.

When you are suffering from a cough, you need to lie down for days, and have warm liquid and hot food, but you can’t bring yourself to the level of the eat-and-do-nothing stage. That can’t be done.

You must have an antibiotic, but you can’t have it. You have to go to a doctor to get a prescription, then to the pharmacist in your drugstore.

How long a lapse of time? At least two days, more if you are afflicted on a weekend.

In the news we read about important people who recently have died of pneumonia, or we read about movie stars, now recuperating from respiratory afflictions. They are examples, regardless of their fame.

They represent the nearly ten thousand people who die every year because of cold-related illnesses in the U.S. alone, and their condition doesn’t make news. The majority perhaps is heavy smokers with health dimmed by alcohol or advanced age.

But when stricken, first the uncaring attitude of yesteryear comes into play and forces people to ignore. The menacing guest this year will part. But this year sure will be like other years. Precious hours are lost doing just about nothing. Just rest and you will be all right is the common thinking. When the severity of the illness become clear, they finally go to a doctor. Afterward either they come home, or they go to a hospital. Later, they will recuperate either way, calling it another cold. Decadent!

Now what if these people had taken a dose of antibiotics according to their own judgment at the earliest sign of having a little discomfort in the lungs, before reaching a doctor to check the sound of the respiration with a stethoscope?

Antibiotics don’t kill anybody if taken without a doctor’s prescription, and if you are allergic to certain brand, you know it before the doctor. And one antibiotic pill taken on the first day is worth ten taken three days later. The same goes with cortisone pills of 0.5 mg strength, which, according to personal judgment, could also be taken.

The doctor may advise you not to take what you are taking, or give you a different medicine, but whatever kind of antibiotic you take on your own at the onset is the most effective and un-deniably the best first-aid you can get. And first-aid doesn’t seem to exist, outside of the aspirin-family for the patient with an oncoming severe influenza, and perhaps pneumonia later, or some bad after-effects later still.

Why are a few capsules of antibiotics denied over-the-counter?

A healthy person is unable to get them, but when stricken, and after the magnitude of the illness becomes grave, at least fifty ampules of gentomycin are added to the patient’s injection schedule to fight the flagrant infection in the lungs.

Why is it justified that a person, for first-aid, should sit and pray and wait for the night to pass for an early visit to a doctor the next day and not be able to do anything for himself?

Why should he not have a good fighting chance on his own before reaching a doctor? While he had this illness a hundred times before reaching 50.

So by all means every year refurbish your medicine cabinet by whatever for-bidden means possible for your own quick, personal no–waiting-for-the-doctor response.

In every respect, time lapse is the virus’ best ally. Why do you think that the heads of states never cancel a trip or visit? Why don’t you ever hear; the president is down with a cold resting in the White House for a few days?