To reduce symptoms of any kind of common symptoms, accurate diagnosis is crucial. With age and life experience we learn to make many accurate diagnoses for ourselves. It's important to emphasize that if our self-diagnoses don't work, we need to ask a doctor to diagnose things we might not have suspected, like a disease that might be more serious than "that virus that's going around."
At the time of writing my self-diagnosis is Aggravated Norwalk Flu.
Norwalk Flu, or norovirus, is not a true flu virus. It's that mostly harmless, but incredibly annoying, 24-hour tummybug that circulates every few years, at any time of year. You know you're going to have it if you see someone displaying nausea or diarrhea in a public place, or use a restroom they've used, or smell the distinctive odor of the virus on their breath. It's airborne; live virus can float a long way through the air, so keeping a healthy distance is not always effective, and the effects come and go too rapidly for quarantine to do much good either. You know you have it when the virus invading your body gives the order, "Nothing else can be done until the digestive system is completely empty." A completely empty digestive system is very debilitating--not because your insides are getting a rest from digesting food, which can be a good thing, but because you're low on water. That causes weakness, dizziness, headaches, fainting, depressed mood, and sometimes acute full-body cramps.
Usually you just sip some water, after the nausea and diarrhea subside indicating that your body is empty, and within 24 hours you're back on the job. There are, however, people like me who lack resistance to this virus and can have additional, ongoing, flu-type symptoms. About two-thirds of the times I've had Norwalk Flu I felt as good as ever the next day. The other times include the only time in my life when other people have worried abut my surviving.
I was four years old and remember, mainly, that the episode started with a stupid little-kid response. I suddenly felt sick. "If you feel sick, go and lie down and you'll feel better," Mother had said to someone during the past few days. I went and lay down on the couch. We were leasing a house furnished with a particularly ugly, prickly, olive-green couch. A few minutes later I rolled over and was sick. Dad was at home, being the house-spouse, and rushed in to yell "WHY didn't you go to the garbage can!" as he rushed back out for cleaning supplies and tried to salvage the couch. I toddled off to the bathroom instead. When I came back the couch looked worse than ever and Dad had mustered some sense of empathy. "I've always hated that couch anyway. We'll get a new one. Now why don't you lie down in bed with the wastebasket right beside the bed." That seemed like a good idea.
After that, what I remember is being positively encouraged to drink 7-Up and feeling better the next morning. I'm told that that was the next morning I got up, as opposed to a few mornings in between when I don't even remember adults cleaning the bed. I'm told that first Dad and then Mother felt sick and had to lie down in the daytime, but not at the same time, so one of them could keep an eye on me as my temperature rose. I slept through that part.
When people are very ill they sometimes wake up, but with a different part of their brain than they normally use; they don't remember things that happened before they were so ill, and later, as memories return, they don't remember much that happened while they were so ill. My husband seemed to have three distinct personalities during his last days--all competent and capable, but not on speaking terms with one another, and one of them was unreasonable, selfish, and violence-prone, too.
There was also an episode in my twenties when I was asked to stay with a beloved elder, who was just out of the hospital after a heart attack. On the fourth or fifth day on the job I became irritable when asked to go out and stop visiting children from something they shouldn't have been doing, slapped one of the elder's visiting great-nephews (where, the day before, I'd cheerfully distracted him), yelled at him, rushed in toward the bathroom but was sick over the porch railing instead, then passed out on the guest bed and woke up to the patient telling me that another cousin had brought his car and would take me home now.
I mention that because, yes, unusual irritability does seem to be a prodrome...Earlier in the week Serena, shall we put it charitably, forgot to pull in her claws when she slapped at my hand. All her life this cat, who shows more capacity for love and loyalty and empathy than a normal cat ever does, has slapped at hands that try to pet her. The message is "Don't get soppy! Let's play a good rough game." Unlike most cats Serena was her mother's only living kitten; she soaked up all the food, attention, and affection she could hold but never got enough of the kind of rough games kittens play. Even when a foster brother was found for her, although she loved him, he couldn't really keep up with her. So when I'm feeling closest to Serena I give her something to chase, and she shows appreciation by allowing me to stroke her fur once or twice. She hasn't slapped me with a claw for years now.
But she did; and yesterday afternoon, I said irritably to Serena, "See this mark on my hand? YOU did that. Why should I feed you?"
"Yes, I remember what I did, and I'll do it again!" Serena growled. "Get away from me! You smell disgusting!"
"Well I'm about to smell even worse," I said, proceeding to light a fire outdoors. But I wondered: why was Serena so irritable, and why was I? Did I, in fact, smell disgusting--as in infectious? When she used to scratch me, as a kitten, Serena always seemed contrite and usually licked the wound. She's never been shy about reminding me that soap, cleaning supplies, smoke, and most things other than food that leave odors on human hands, are disgusting to cats, but she's never seemed to blame me for that. She is the cat who sat beside me and purred when I was sick with salmonella, the cat who plopped down on top of her daughter and showed her daughter how to rear kittens, the cat who knows when to adopt kittens and when to euthanize them. I don't think I've ever seen her really angry, though I have seen her delirious and dangerous. Her sudden grumpiness, and mine, seemed like symptoms of something, though not a glyphosate reaction or an allergy...
This was Thursday. What I'd eaten since Sunday had been a pecan candy bar, two bottles of soda pop, and three bottles of water. The candy bar, and one of the bottles of pop, had been provided as a snack on a job site on Sunday. I'd been paid, counted my money, and promised myself, "When the odd jobs man comes up to collect those things he was going to buy and sell for me, I'll get him to take me to Norton; there'll be enough money for him to treat a relative to lunch while I buy lots and lots of heavy canned vegetables that I can't possibly carry in all at once, some cleaning supplies I've run out of, and some cotton yarn to knit more dish rags."
I had sold completely out of dish rags in December and made plans to join a car pool going to the Wal-Mart in Bristol, but first the Big Freeze kept them at home and then one of them lost a relative, and so far this year I've had nothing smaller than a child's sweater or blanket to sell if people had wanted to buy anything. The Wal-Mart in Kingsport can hardly be said to have a yarn department any more, having given up competing with Michaels and Ben Franklin, but those stores' prices are higher.
So, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, now Thursday, no odd jobs man came into sight. The people who pay him for a day's work had been doing their own chores and errands The cheerful chap who delivers the Pure Life water Serena endorses had brought some water, which was fantastically good news, and said he'd pick up the vegetables when he went to Wal-Mart in the course of his job, but I hadn't seen him either. Well, his new mechanic's not really been tested yet, so why put any extra strain on his truck, I'd thought, when I really wanted to go to a Wal-Mart that still has a decent yarn department, anyway. I would just tell him I'd gone to the Wal-Mart in Norton, which has the best yarn department, and all would be well...if that odd jobs man had ever come up to do a job.
I reckon I know where they were, now. The cheerful deliveryman had said some uncheerful things to and about someone who'd called his cell phone, too.
So I hadn't had food in the house, other than medicinal garlic; I hadn't wanted to spend the money on anything outside of that long list of things I buy only at Wal-Mart. The thought had crossed my mind that I have no natural obligation to treat the odd jobs man's relatives to anything, but they are old people who left a mining camp to move into low-income housing, and somebody ought to do something nice for them.
But by Thursday I was hungry enough to remember some dried beans I'd taken in trade, about a year ago, I forget just when. They'd been shelled and dried at home but the people who raised the beans hadn't used them--they weren't fresh when I got them. It was a sunny afternoon, not as springlike as the real Thaw afternoons had been, but for January it was warm. I said to myself, "If I start early I might be able to cook dry beans over an open fire. I'll stay warm tending a fire." So I skimmed the trash and ashes off the top of the trash barrel, laid a cooking fire with a nice selection of hardwood trimmings from the orchard, and set the beans on to boil.
It was one of those contrary days we get sometimes. The sun shone warm, but the wind blew cold in short sharp gusts, this way and that way, and whenever there was a flame at one side of the bean pot, the wind seemed to be blowing the heat out away from the pot. If I used one match to light that fire, I used thirty to relight it. Paper, cardboard, and plastic burned but the actual wood never caught fire. The beans were very old and dry. The pot did boil, a few times, but never quite long enough. After four hours the beans were still only half done, and I was feeling chilly enough to try to finish simmering them indoors over a candle. And after four hours there most of them were really still too hard to be fit to eat. I ate a few--not many--and dumped them out for the possum, feeling very impatient and irritable indeed. That was at nine o'clock. A little after eleven o'clock I took a nap.
Then at one o'clock in the morning I woke up with only one consideration on my mind, which was at which angle to lean over the emergency bucket first. During the next three hours I lost seven quarts of liquid and a few recognizable bits of indigestible, incompletely cooked beans.
"Mercy! Where has he been eating bitter beans?" was my mother's reaction to that song. Now I know. If beans are all you ate immediately before going down with norovirus they become very bitter indeed.
By this time I was feeling weak as a day-old chick with the pip, hardly able to force myself to sit up and sip some Pure Life water, and then the cramps started. They started with the "Charley Horse" sort of thing and went on and on and on. I reached for the bottle of water, and my hand cramped; it was hard to get the fingers to hold a bottle. Everything cramped. I wanted very much to empty and clean the bucket, but wasn't sure I could take that many steps without falling.
I woke up feeling horribly dry, still cramping, and now developing flu-type symptoms. Maybe because I'd slept three hours close to a bucket full of virus, the Norwalk Flu was starting to behave like flu. But now I could lift the bucket and carry it out. Now I had some extra bottles of hand sanitizer that were still only approaching their use-by date. I took a sponge bath all over in hand sanitizer and scrubbed some things I would normally have cleaned with other products with hand sanitizer, too, for the time being.
Cramps are not part of an immune system's overreacting, or needing more time to finish its job. Could I get rid of them?
Cramps can be caused by many different things/ Most often they're caused by simple strain or abuse of a muscle, like swimming with a full stomach. The regular monthly cramps some young women get are the result of involuntary muscles making their tiny movements while the body is full of mostly-digested food, and often respond well (as in, go away) when the woman does a little stretching and trigger-point massage, and makes an extra visit to the bathroom, or two. "Charley Horse" usually makes his nighttime visits to people who used their legs much longer, or in a different way, than they normally do; if you want him to leave you alone, walk a few miles every morning in comfortable shoes.
Cramps can also be caused by dehydration, in response to an electrolyte imbalance in the blood. This condition is cured by rehydration with electrolytes, such as water with some sugar and/or salt in it.
I finished the bottle of Pure Life I hadn't been able to finish during the night, and another one. I felt better after drinking that water, but the cramps were not subsiding.
I don't usually buy Mountain Dew but I happened to have a bottle of it handy today. I took just a sip. The cramps subsided. I sipped some more. I still felt individual muscles twitching and feeling stiff, but that's bearable. I could walk confidently. I could hold out my hands and type. So I came online.
This afternoon the screen porch has been so warm and comfortable that I lay back, while typing this, and caught up on a little of last night's lost sleep.
I thought a bit about personal assistants, and the horrible thought of needing one, today. For long-term care people usually want a personal assistant close to their own age, someone with whom they can work on things that interest them.
For short-term care...if I had had to put out a call for personal assistance today, say--I think I'd rather have a healthy, perky student, the kind that are still growing and so usually have robust immune systems, and live alone or with equally hardy roommates. Often the promise of instant grown-up wages and lifelong job security attracts little girls, who have reached a full height of maybe five foot one with their boots on. Seeing students like that--even like 5'4" me--in a nursing course often makes the teachers (and the patients on whom they have to practice) sigh, "What's that little girl going to do when some 185-pound patient is lying on the floor?" Well, I am still a 125-pound patient, probably temporarily down below 120 with the dehydration, as cooperative as my legs may be. A small nurse would be fine by me. The big athletic girls, and the few boys who take the course, they should save to send out to the bigger patients. And I don't think it would ever do me any good to spend a lot of time with a real extrovert, but updates on how younger people live, the slang they use, the music they like, and that sort of thing, are entertaining and can be useful; if I become a patient at this stage in my life, I'd be the sort a student could talk to. I know I'd have to depend on one of those agencies that run on a combination of federal funding and charitable donations, which I hate, and they take what they get, with a lot of home nurses who aren't satisfactory in any way; but if I had to use such an agency, I'd be willing to take one of those tiny, young, cute students whose first nursing course gives them the chance to reflect on reasons why they'd rather become accountants. I hate home nursing myself, I could tell her, but one of the very best home nurses, Grandma Bonnie Peters, was not only small but also living with an injury that prevented her carrying a full jug of water; all of her patients were able to walk, and all of them loved her.
But I did not have to call for any kind of nurse! Thanks to Mountain Dew!
Some people would say that 7-Up, which has no caffeine, or Gatorade, which isn't carbonated, would be better ways to rehydrate with electrolyte supplements. That would probably have been the case for me if I'd had any 7-Up or Gatorade. I had neither.
Mountain Dew contains more caffeine than most people really need and is best sipped slowly, from small cups, alternating with plain water, if you have not built up an excessive tolerance to caffeine.. Hypothyroid people, who feel a jarring, sickening jolt rather than a healthy energy boost when they use caffeine, should not use caffeinated soda pop or "energy drinks" at all. Diabetics should not use drinks with added sugar. For a quick electrolyte boost those people might need to use real fruit juice or chicken broth. If the food value in those drinks reactivated norovirus, they might have a few more unpleasant hours ahead of them.
Those multi-vitamin-and-mineral supplements would be even better sources of electrolytes since they contain calcium, magnesium, and potassium. They are good to have in the house, whether you take them daily or occasionally. I didn't have any of them in the house. They were on that list of things to buy at Wal-Mart, because I'd tried that store brand and they'd seemed to work for me./
Mountain Dew is generally considered junkfood. It certainly is not health food. I only had it in the house because the store closest to the house had had a sale. But it hit the spot for me.
/As I sign off for the night...I hope none of you Gentle Readers ever finds any use for this information, or use it only in writing fiction. But here it is, to use or not.
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