BYTE MARKS
Web sites can help fight a cold
By Burt Lum
During this season of giving and receiving, I got something I really didn't want — a nasty cold.
It must have something to do with the weather changing, but for several years I've been pretty good about avoiding the bug. But there it was one weekend, that distinctively irritating feeling in my nasal passage. For me, that's the tell-tale sign of a cold coming on.
People who know me will attest to my sorry condition from this one. So a couple of hearty cold warriors recommended a product called Zicam. It works by inhibiting the cold virus from infecting the nasal cells.
There's a good site to read about it and get the best prices; www.zicampriceinfo.com. I checked it out at Longs, which unfortunately was sold out.
By this time, I was probably already too far into the cold progression anyway, I figured, and decided to tough it out instead.
The cold progressed into my chest. When it gets to this point, the coughing intensifies and it becomes hell on earth.
After several nights of absolutely no sleep because of gut-wrenching coughing bouts, one caring soul told me to go see a doctor. In this case, getting a checkup seemed a better idea than dying of the cough. Lucky I did, as my cold had progressed to acute bronchitis.
I won't detail what I was coughing up but the only thing able to fight it off at this point was antibiotics. My doc prescribed a combination of an antibiotic called Avelox and a cough suppressant called Tussionex. With that combination, I was finally on the road to recovery.
A site that helped me understand what I was going through was www.gettingwell.com.
I could look up information on the drugs like Tussionex. None of the over-the-counter cough suppressants worked for me. Tussionex works, though, as it goes right to the cough center.
The site also provides overview of diseases and ailments, in my case bronchitis. If you understand what's happening to your body, it's easier to manage the illness.
Next time, I'll also have a dose of Zicam ready. ;-)
Burt Lum is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.
