Every year about this time of year I wind up with a sinus infection. This is the time when the windows get closed and the heat gets turned on. We have forced air heat, which makes things even worse. And then there’s also all of that leaf mold being blown around outside.
It always starts with a drip down the back of my throat. I start to feel the glands under my jaw getting larger and tender to the touch. Then my sinuses start to get stuffy. Within four days, I am at the doctor’s office getting an antibiotic because, although the whole thing begins with allergies and a virus, all of that yuck in my head is a great breeding ground for bacteria as well. I have, in the past, been laid up for almost two weeks.
This year I was ready. I was ready with Vitamin C, Echinacea, Oregano leaf and oil, Goldenseal, Zicam swabs and Zicam mouth spray, and saline nasal spray. At the first sign (the scratchy throat) I quarantined myself for one day and spent the day dosing myself every three hours with all of the above. In the morning and at night, I added a Benedryl to the drill.
The mouth spray pretty much kills your taste buds for the duration, so the orange juice I consumed throughout the day tasted like metal. As did everything else I ate. But that’s a small price to pay for avoiding being miserable for two weeks.
The kalilily cold cure means having a day with no stress — a day when you can rest, drink all the juice and tea you can stand, and dose yourself every three hours with immune system strengthening products. Over the course of one day, I ingested about 3,000 mg of Vitamin C, 1300 mg of Enchinacea, 900 mg of Oregano, four droppersfull of Goldenseal extract, and a quart and a half of orange juice. At night, I rubbed Vicks on my swollen glands and wrapped my neck in a towel.
That was yesterday. Today, except for some stuffiness in my sinuses (which I tend to have all winter) I am feeling fine. Well, also except for the stubborn cold sore, on which I’m using Abreva. What I should have done at the first sign of the cold sore is start taking L-lysine, which is an amino acid that that makes one’s system inhospitable for the Type 1 herpes simplex virus (which is what causes cold sores). My mother takes it to prevent a recurrence of shingles.
For the rest of the week I will continue to take daily doses of all of those substances, but cut them down to 1/3 of what I took yesterday. And I’ll keep using the saline nose spray all winter.
I discovered an interesting product called Xlear — a saline nasal spray with xylitol, a sweet-tasting substance that discourages the growth of bacteria in the nasal passages and throat. That got me through last winter with no sinus infection at all. I need to start using it as soon as the heat gets turned on. Obviously, I neglected to do that this year.
So, if you’re prone to colds and sinus problems, set yourself up with an arsenal of immune system strengthening products, megadose yourself the first day you feel symptoms starting, and avoid the misery that so many of us are confronted with each winter.

Frank Paynter posted about it, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t pick up on the implications until I read what he wrote. He begins his post with this:

This post is not about the grim and twisted irony of the violence of a school shooting in Amish country. Rather, I want to draw attention to the unspoken horror of the misogyny, the hate crime against the female gender that it represents.

Frank links to several female bloggers who posted vehemently and accurately about what seems to be an increasing number of hate crimes against females. He ends his post with this:

Misogyny is everywhere. It’s in the burka. It’s in the genital mutilation of so-called “female circumcision.” It’s in the Chinese infanticide of baby girls. It’s practically a human condition. Yet once slavery was a human condition too, and now, except for a few corporate monsters, some backwards nations, and the perversion of sexual slavery it has largely been wiped out. Can we make progress against misogyny too?

I wonder why all of us female bloggers aren’t all posting about how the status and safety of all of us females is consistently being eroded. Why aren’t we mad as hell!
Every night, my news stations report the rape and murder of some female, the lethal violence against some child. Tonight it was what was believed to be a mother and daughter murdered in an apartment on NYC’s upper west side.