Chapter IV Page 2

The same thing goes for all heads of state all over the globe. Quick response is available to them through their personal physicians, who are members of their staff. They push a button and their doctor comes. You, too, should push a button in your head to become your own doctor when the early symptoms come. It is not all the doctor who knocks off a presidential cold. It is the striking back quickly that cures.

Catching cold, year after year, has given you enough experience to make you a first-rate doctor for yourself in this particular field. Not falling in the clutches of a cold to an extent that would disrupt your work should not remain a luxury for the VIPs only. You just need to know how to cure a common cold at the onset fast, without after-effects.

Taking antibiotics as preventive medicine for infection is not without precendent. When a patient undergoes surgery in a hospital, antibiotics are given to prevent infection.

Why doesn’t the same concept hold good for a pair of lungs about to be congested with pathogenic agents, or in a simple word – pus? Should this condition be taken lightly because it is not accompanied with fever, and it is expected that you can live with it for a period of time, which sometimes can be the whole winter?

It is better to take antibiotics before your lungs get infected. Take plenty of vitamin C in the form of sherbet, 1500 mg twice a day. Use three tablets of this vitamin, crush them into powder form, and add tap water and sugar in a glass stir and drink it. And if you have vitamin C in powder form. Fine.

It is a very tasteful drink, and you won’t mind having it even for several days more after you are quite well. Drink this when you are likely to have a drink of some sort.

Don’t allow yourself to think that it should be after meals, during or before. Your next meal may be two hours away. Drink it when you know you can absorb it quickly and not necessarily at any set time. A simple thirst for water could justify it.

You are lucky if your lot after a cold is a wet cough, which eventually phases out and does not hamper your sleep. With a dry cough you suffer more because you can’t sleep at night. Every night with a day cough, is a long night’s journey into morning.

When the sweet doze-off comes, you are suddenly jolted into a whitish awake-ness by a cough so violent that it shakes your being down to every nerve-root.

In desperation you might swallow a cough-depressant or you may put a cough drop into your cheek and close your eyes, only to have the violent cough come again after you fall into a brief sleep. Three or four times this happens, and then sleep and you become total strangers for the rest of the night.

During the day you repeatedly fall into fits of coughing, sometimes for no understandable reason, and sometimes when you whiff in a wisp of cigarette smoke passing under your nose, per-fume, lotion, sprays, exhaust fumes, pollen, dust-anything, not necessarily with an odor.

This condition is unlikely to phase itself out during the winter and usually happens to people who take up their drinking habit too soon after a cold.

Alcohol is the worst thing, at the onset, during the course of a cold, and soon after. It makes your lungs temporarily allergic to virtually everything. When in such a condition don’t avoid cough drops or antihistamines.

Don’t waste a lot of time going through chest x-rays, blood tests and so on, then be told that nothing is wrong, and that your condition is caused only by post-nasal drip! If you think that is the right diagnosis, wash your nasal pass-ages with salt water, and gargle with the rest of it in the glass.

When you can not sleep at night because of the cough, which you know is the residue of a bout with a cold, no matter how long ago. And during the day when you breathe in air and exhalation tends to be in the form of a cough, and the repeated fits of hernia-hurting coughs come more than you can tolerate; take the final action.

If you don’t have stomach ulcers, don’t waste time. Take cortisone pills of 0.5 mg strength along with an antibiotic three times a day. Ampicillin will do – capsules of 500 mg once every eight hours. You will get rid of the cough within the first day of the take.

You sleep a drug-free sleep, be-cause you owe yourself so much sleep that you don’t need pills to induce it. Continue this treatment for ten days, but taper off the dosage of the cortisone pills from the fifth day on until it becomes almost nil on the tenth day.

By then you will be totally free from the black cough which ruined your sleep and brought nocturnal despair for you and your family.

Remember also something else. Even to healthy people, the bloating of the stomach at night with raw fruit, beans, salad, milk, ice cream or any dairy products like yogurt, cheese or starchy food, aggravates a dry cough badly and could bring night coughs.

Forego even the supposedly curative warm glass of milk and aspirin before bedtime.

Those mentioned are all gas-producing food items which make you belch (according to your choice, either loud or quietly), and just because you can not do that while lying down, your throat tickles as part of a nervous response to a needed release that can not take place.

You wake up, sitting in bed coughing violently and glaring in the dark. Sometimes gas purges through between coughs. Diet plays a big role here.

Try to sleep on a lean, near hungry stomach all year round if you have problems coughing at night. That helps your quick recovery from a persistent cold-cough also.

Some people, for good measure, drink several cups of hot tea with half of a lemon squeezed in it, thinking that it warms their throat and passes vitamin C over the aggravated tissues of the throat and also provides an abundant supply of vitamin C to the body.

This is the worst thing you can do. This even brings coughs to healthy people because of a sour stomach. Forego even the vitamin C sherbet when you have a dry cough. A sour stomach, without you even feeling it, makes the throat tickle and you cough.

Here’s another point to consider. When you are well, always let the tasty dressing remain in the bowl after you finish your salad. Don’t drink it.

And, of course, you know that too much coffee gives you a nervous stomach and that makes you cough also. If you are not a smoker and you don’t want unjustified coughs, play fair with your stomach.

Obviously, there are times when you just can’t do that. You just can’t play fair because over-filling your stomach at a good dinner party is unavoidable.

Or, you let yourself become too hungry, and you sit at the dinner table and you eat. You eat long after you had enough because your mind, due to its pre-set conditioning having received so many hungry signals, can not tune itself with the eating race.

You eat until your stomach literally has no more room or space. For lack of space you don’t eat anymore and not because you are no longer hungry. But it is not too grave a sin if you do it only once in a while.

When bedtime comes and you are overfilled, pump the gas out of your stomach by kicking one foot at a time up in the air like a soccer player. Do this exercise for fifteen minutes, not necessarily continuously, rest in between.

After a while gas starts purging upward sporadically, but in an amount that eventually could fill a bicycle tube.

Aside from the advantage of relieving your stomach to make you sleep better, this exercise, if done every night for years, not necessarily for the stomach, is bound to give you the build of a flamenco dancer regardless of your age.

All you will be needing then, Tammy, would be a pair of castanets.

Suddenly I recollect your repeated smiles the first time I tried to teach you backgammon – a word so unknown those days in the English speaking world that one probingly could have guessed backgammon to be the name of a tropical tree.

And I recall trying to learn this song from you once when we were on a picnic. I may keep searching for its meaning, forever.

Chicori chic chola chola
Chicori chic in a vananeka
Chicori chic chola cholaaa ...
Chicori chic is me.

But what great meaning can there be that you and I once sang it, and our voices mixed, and we stopped to laugh at my clumsiness in learning those idiotically charming words?

One with a big girth, in a year with the soccer-kick exercise, may run out of notch-holes on the trousers belt. In two, the need may arise to purchase a new belt and trousers altogether.

You can pump your stomach by kicking up a bended knee. This keeps your center of gravity nearer to where it was before, reducing the risk of falling or gyrating out of balance.

Rhythmically, with each thigh, give a jolt to your stomach. Do this, even if you are already too big to let fly a soccer kick. Start it off so. Don’t risk a fall if you are big and middle-aged. Of course stationary bicycling in front of television would do the same thing for you. If you don’t have this tool kick while holding the frame of a door.

Kick up hard, not rattlingly, but like as if you want to send someone out on a trajectory.