HIRE
Either from too much time outside Sunday afternoon in the fall pollen and leaf mold spores, or from a buildup of germs in the petri dish called school, on Monday morning I woke up with fire and sand in my throat. Ugh. Strep was going around in my neck of the woods and I needed to be checked. Last time I thought it was strep it was the flu. Last time I thought it was the flu it was covid.
After hum-hawing a bit and taking my temperature, I forced myself to get ready as usual so I could be first in line at the doc’s office. It worked.
After a look at my ears and throat, the doc said I had an infection even though the rapid strep was negative. Pretty much my whole chronic medical history is sinusitis or some insect bite reaction. I got the usual: steroid shot, cough/sinus combo for bedtime, and a common antibiotic.
At some point I had heard that you can’t have dairy products while taking antibiotics or you could have dairy either before or after you took your pill. So I looked it up on the amazing internet.
Well. Some sites say you can have yogurt, but not milk. And some sources say you can have milk with certain antibiotics. But don’t eat grapefruit or other citrus fruit. Fermented things were great for you. Things like kraut, pickles, kefir, not fermented adult beverages.
And there were charts and timelines of how many hours before or after a dosage you could have milk. I figured milk at lunch would work. But I would miss that bowl of cereal at night.
And some antibiotics make you bloat and have gas, so eating the easily digested BRAT diet of bananas, rice, applesauce, toast was suggested. But some sites recommended eating broccoli and cauliflower while taking antibiotics. Really?!! That would be a double whammy!
Antibiotics can also cause, uhm, other intestinal disturbances, if you know what I mean. The latter I knew about and it was concerning because I did have an episode of c. Diff one time.
So I researched probiotics to prevent any major gut upset while taking antibiotics. But sometimes the antibiotics kill off certain probiotics, so I had to research more. Do you know how many probiotic product brands there are? And how many combinations of probiotics come with each? And how many of the ingredients start with Lactobacillus? I needed a Lactobacillus rhamnosus and Saccharomyces boulardii combo. I settled for what I already had at the house and bought a pack with only Saccharomyces boulardii.
After reading all those, I felt half fluent in Latin.
Then I found out I needed to feed the probiotics with pre-biotics! Topping a top ten list were chickory root and dandelion green, out of season and not what a sinus sufferer wants to go looking for. Luckily onion, banana, and oats were on the list. Not together, of course.
But I must quit typing now. It’s time for a horse pill, a few milliliters of cough/ sinus combo and a dose of Saccharomyces boulardii.
It’s a lot of work being sick.
