Rabbit hole

My long history of catching colds and flus

Introduction

I write this as I am deadly ill from some bug since last Wednesday.

Between the ages of 5 to 10, I was catching colds and flus at about the same rate that I was buying booster packs to fill out my Pokémon stickers album with. I was in and out of doctors all the time. My mother gave me all kinds of drugs that didn't make any difference. One doctor told her that I have a "predisposition" to catch colds and flus (if I remember correctly), and another warned her to stop giving me antibiotics so often because that was not always necessary and was part of the reason why my teeth were completely decaying. I don't know if what these doctors said is true, but anyway, that's how miserable I was a kid. I was just sick all the time.

Between the ages of 11 until the end of high school, things marginally improved, though catching a cold or a flu, usually once at the peak of summer and then another time around Christmas, became almost a tradition. I sort of came to expect (nay dread) it.

I kid you not: I remember more Christmas days, sitting under the tree, unwrapping another Nintendo video game that had I asked to get for a gift, while being completely covered in snot and germs, coughing and sneezing like I'm about to pass out, than Christmas days where I was not sick. In fact, being sick and spending my time in recovery playing video games, became two activities so strongly connected in my brain, that whenever I get sick these days, decades later, I begin to feel the "urge" to go play something. It's like a craving. I suddenly really crave playing games. That's just often that happened to me as a kid.

It wasn't until maybe late 2009, when I was already sort of moving out of my parent's house, that catching colds and flus became so unbearably inconvenient to me, that I began to do some serious research trying to figure out how I could avoid catching them so often and also heal quicker (it often took me more than two weeks to be able to slowly begin doing anything again).

Revelation

Then I married my wife in 2017. She studied medicine, so she knew one or two things about how to avoid catching colds and flus.

This will seem odd to you, and I feel embarrassed to admit it, but it was only through her that I learned, for example, that I'm not supposed to touch my face with my hands like... ever, unless it's absolutely necessary. Human hands, even right after being washed, are about the filthiest objects in the known universe. She taught me that our noses, eyes, mouths, and ears are the usual vectors of attack, and we transport the diseases onto these sites with our hands.

This is part of the reason why infants are so often sick, because they are literally going through the phase where they learn about their environment by touching things and putting them in their tiny, filthy mouths. It's (the miserable) part of the process of building up their immune systems. They then also naturally rub themselves all over their parents, getting the entire family sick. I'm sure that those among you who are parents know what I'm talking about.

Side note: My wife studied medicine, yes, but she would herself say that you shouldn't take her word for it and consult other doctors to make sure. I'm not trying to state any definitive facts here. If we're wrong about something, please do tell me. I want to learn as much about avoiding catching colds and flus as I can.

What changed the game forever, was when my wife taught me about the effect of "sugar" on the immune system.

You see, sugar (specifically, refined sugars, like those found in candies, sweets, pastries, chocolate, etc.) are to our immune system cells what alcohol is to us: we can get drunk on them, and then we don't "function" as normal anymore. Conversely, when our immune system cells get "drunk" on sugar, they don't defend us from viral or bacterial infections as well anymore either.

There's more though: While we do have an "immune system" that spans our entire bodies, there are also "local immune systems". In my case, my wife concluded that my nose, ears, and throat, are the weakest part of my body. Why? We don't know. It could be a weakness that I was born with and/or that developed in my childhood. Either way, that area is one such local immune system. There is even a medical specialty called "otorhinolaryngology", which deals with exactly this part of our bodies: ear ("oto"), nose ("rhino"), and throat ("laryngo"). You often hear them being called "ear, nose, throat doctors" to make it simple. All of this to say that my nose, ears, and throat are absolute weaksauce.

This was both a revelation to me, as well as a death sentence.

I'm a sweet tooth. I always have been and likely always will be. As a Portuguese man, I'm particularly drawn to pastries, though chocolate takes a close second place for me. Indeed, was raised on sweets and chocolate. My mother always had some around the house for me to occasionally snack on. She wouldn't let me eat them every day, but I would eat them more often than was good for me.

So, it was no surprise to my wife and I that once I began cutting refined sugars out of my diet, I also stopped getting sick so often. The solution had been under nose for almost three decades.

Misery

I still catch a cold or a flu about once or twice a year. It's just impossible not to. Sometimes, circumstances force me to be around people who have caught some cold or flu. If those circumstances are combined with poor sleep and a diet rich in fats and refined sugars, then I'm almost guaranteed to get sick. This happens almost every time I visit my family, for example, which is when my diet is forcibly changed and I don't get enough sleep (not getting enough sleep is another habit that weakens our immune system).

Side note: I'm 35 and I still don't know what the difference between a cold or a flu is. In fact, my wife doesn't know either. The more we look into this, the more we are confused. It seems that the terms are basically used interchangeably by both doctors and patients alike. Go figure. I started calling this process "catching a bug", because I'm tired of not knowing whether to use "cold" or "flu". My symptoms are almost always the same, regardless of whether I caught a bacteria or a virus anyway:

I have all of these at the moment, by the way.

I couldn't type anything yesterday. It's a miracle that I typed this much today. I think that the rage is powering me up. I'm so angry that I got sick again, at the worst possible time (not that there's ever a convenient time to get sick, but right now I really didn't want to).

Most people that I know can shake off a bug in about a week or so, especially if they take some kind of medicine. They can even take symptom-suppressing drugs, allowing them to go on doing whatever it is that they normally do. This leads me to the reason why I'm writing this essay to begin with: I'm not like that. No medicine speeds up my recovery, and almost no drugs can suppress the symptoms. I'm just, again, complete weaksauce with lamenoodles.

So, what happens when I catch a bug, is that I'm basically disabled, at least for two weeks, though often longer, and in some extreme cases, I've been out of commission for longer than a month (I hope that's not the case with my current bug). In fact, I get so sick, that I can't even use the free time to do anything useful around the house, or even "entertain" myself. I can only, literally, rot in bed.

The war on bugs

I did, however, discover some things that help me to both speed up my recovery as well as help me to feel less miserable from the symptoms: