I'm sick.
Feels like bronchitis. I don't mind the timing frankly, as it's making me less inclined to shop at the last minute.
Wait. That's not true. I go anyway and just make bad wheezing noises when I stand in line for an hour.
However, it's a great tool for remembering how much the people around me care.
Sometimes too much.
I will get great recipes from all sorts of people (or hear about remedies and cure-alls) and will try them ALL in the hopes that one or another (or a combination thereof) will be miraculously beneficial for my health.
And I do. (Try them ALL that is).
I've never been one to shrink at experimenting with natural remedies on myself regardless of how bad they taste or how little I understand the possible effects.
I'll give you an example...
About two months ago, I watched a great independent film called Food Matters.
It's about the drug industry, natural remedies, and the truth about what goes on behind closed doors and how if we aren't careful, we'll end up worse than before we got sick, and that the food we choose is more important than we know...
(Sort of a Michael Moore meets Super-Size Me on the pharmaceutical industry).
Anyway, in the movie they talked about the benefits of niacin.
For those of you whose only familiarity with niacin rivals mine - ie; it's one of the essential vitamins in Corn Flakes - nicain is a B vitamin that aids in lowering cholesterol (among other things) and has proved itself useful in alleviating depression, improving memory, circulation, blah blah blah.
And its benefits haven't fully been explored.
I'm thinking, 'great! I'm getting older, I should be taking this for my brain'!
So off I went to the vitamin section of my local store and got me some.
(I know that's not proper English but given what I am about to tell you, I deserve to sound like a hick.)
Where was I? Oh yeah... I get home, and without even reading the directions, down TWO on an empty stomach.
(You'd think it was going to cure me of bad dates or something).
But I thought, it's a VITAMIN - how bad could it be? I take chinese herbs that are so mild you can take between like, 6 and 30 pills a day and it hardly makes a difference.
(At least the ones I take).
Anywho, I forget about it and pop into the shower, and contemplate what I'm going to make for dinner as a friend of mine is dropping over.
About 20 minutes go by and my scalp starts to get itchy.
Followed by EVERY part of my body.
And then it starts to burn. And I mean, like someone lit 10,000 matches and held them all one millimeter above my skin.
I look at my arms and they are changing shades into a crimson red before my very eyes.
Think BEET RED. BLOOD RED. LOBSTER RED. CORVETTE RED.
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE RED.
I look Like I'd been at Grand Beach on a hot summer day when it was 35 celsius out (that's 90 plus for you non-metric folks) without a drop of suntan oil and no shade as far as the eyes could see.
Ever see what happened to Clint Eastwood in the movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when Ugly forced him to walk through the desert and then left him for dead?
Yeah, that's where I thought I was headed.
I rushed to the bathroom mirror and looked.
Not good.
I went to my bedroom mirror - and got the full length effect.
By now I had stripped down to nothing, turned around, looked at my ass and realized, I HAD NO TAN LINES!
I was a tomato. A VERY RIPE TOMATO that was ON FIRE.
So I headed straight to the shower, turned on the cold water and let it run over my body which was not only itchy, but so hot there was steam coming off it, while I tried in vain to think over and over again:
'What the hell did I eat that caused such an allergic reaction'???
Dumbass.
But that's not the weird part.
While all this was going on, I discovered something interesting about myself...
I am a sick scientific type beneath it all.
Because at one point, I actually looked in the mirror and thought:
'WOW. This is AMAZING! I can't believe how bloody red I am! And it's so EVENLY DISTRIBUTED!
and...
'I wonder if this is what happens to people just before they internally combust'?
... because I had read somewhere in my youth about cases of spontaneous internal combustion that were a medical mystery - these people just kind of burned up from the inside out until they blew up and that's what I thought was going to happen to me...
'If I wasn't so freaked out, this would be really cool!'
And then I made my peace with God.
Then I picked up the phone and called my friend who was due to arrive in about an hour and said (while standing there stark naked looking at my Ripley's Believe it or Not body:
"Hey, would you uh... mind coming over a little sooner? I think... well... I've had this bad reaction to something, and... if it gets any worse, you might have to take me to emerg... unless you're busy of course..."
And that's when it hit me.
It was the NIACIN!
(Move over Nancy Drew)
"I gotta go. Call you right back!"
"Wait! What...?"
CLICK
The Internet is a beautiful thing.
What I had was a niacin flush.
Only then, did I read the directions on my bottle.
Take one tablet maximum per day and only on a full stomach.
I had taken two, on an empty one.
A medical advice column on the internet even suggested starting with just half.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
But knowing I was not going to die only heightened my curiosity.
Knowing I had between 20 minutes and an hour or more to endure of this condition, gave me lots of time to revel in the anomaly I had suddenly become and research what was going on inside of my body.
All of my capilaries had expanded at the same time. So my blood vessels were bigger and better than ever! I was a super hero!
No wonder it's good for your circulation.
So I called my friend back:
"You should really come over now. You've just gotta see this before it fades. It's the damndest thing!"
Yeah, I'm a sick puppy.
-----
So when my lovely friend and building manager tells me a shot of his famous Brazilian tequila will kill whatever infection I have, I take it.
Hell, I take TWO!
When my stepmom makes me a concoction of finely chopped red onions doused in sugar and left on the window sill to ferment for a few hours, I drink it.
When my American Monk friend sends me a flu recipe made of basil, ginger root, cloves, cinnamon bark, peppermint, cardamon, turmeric and rock salt, I make it n' take it.
When I read that you can think whatever ills you have away if you just try hard enough, I try that too.
And I try to figure out what wrong thinking caused me to get sick in the first place.
But I'll leave that one for another time...
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got onion breath to wash out of my mouth...
(p.s. - the monk recipe works)
