I am fortunate to have been battling a cold for the past two – maybe three, now – weeks, because it has focused my attention.
If I had felt fine, I might have missed the story in the media about research advances that could result in curing – or preventing – the common cold. Researchers now have a complete genome map for the rhinovirus that causes a cold. They believe there might be a way to neutralize the genetic strategy the rhinovirus uses to infect cells in the lining of the human nose, where the virus attacks.
I can't see the umptillion-dollar cold remedy industry throwing its entire weight behind this research, but it is immediately useful to me to know that a cold starts in the lining of the nose. In the story, a physician says that while we are waiting for the rhinovirus genome research to go forward, the only real treatment for a common cold is to wash out the nasal passages, drink warm drinks, and get plenty of rest. I know how to drink warm drinks and rest, but I am not up on washing out the nasal passages. And the story offered no guidance.
It did make me think of a new commercial I have seen for Zicam, a cold remedy in which an actress holds a Zicam-loaded cotton swab up to her nostril, not entering it into the void, but just touching it to the edge of the nostril, leaving no confusion about what happens next. A trusted friend then, last week, recommended Zicam, but the store was out. Apparently a lot of people read the same story and saw the same commercial.
We did get a version of Zicam that you spray into the mouth. I can't say if it has worked or not. One day my cold seems to be gone, the next day it is back. Today it is back. I should say the THREAT of it is back. I am not so much battling a cold as I am battling coming down with a cold. Battle is probably the wrong word. Washing out the nasal passages does not conjure a battle image, nor does suggestively touching a nostril with a cotton swab, lest we wretch into our Cheerios. Battle is not a strategy of the remedy industry, which wants a cold to last as long as it can.
And, of course, then, I remember my grandmother Susie. Susie DID battle colds. As a young girl in 1890s Alabama, she learned that a woman's medical mission was to keep the men in the fields. I am awed to having had a direct living link to someone who knew about life in 1890s Alabama, and to be only one more living link away from someone who lived during the Civil War, and how far medicine has come in less than three full human lifetimes.
Actually, I never learned how Susie may have battled colds in the 1890s. From other treatments she practiced, I expect her original cold treatment may have involved a black, tarry substance she swore by. By the time I was born, the remedy community had introduced Vicks Salve, which was brutal enough for her cold treatment standards and had the advantage of avoiding injurious violent resistance by the victim.
Still, it was a battle image: me against her, and her and Vicks against this cold that was keeping this six-year-old man out of the first-grade fields. She layered it on my chest and on top of that placed a cuptowel that she had pre-heated to 500 degrees in the oven. She pulled the covers up under my chin, got a teaspoon, heaped it with Vicks, handed it to me and told me to swallow it.
That is the kind of battle image I almost want to deploy against this cat-and-mouse cold. Almost, but not quite.
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