Shit

[mistergoat]

This is great. I went to bed last night feeling kind of cold, and then I woke up at 6:40 am with a pounding headache, sweating. When I took my temperature, it was about 101. Yet it's finals time, and i have a major paper due by midnight tomorrow. And the professor to whom I owe said paper is in Australia

Comments

[chilimuffin]

Do you want to get better faster or do you want the symptoms to go away so you can write your paper and suffer later?

the latter is easier than the former.

To get better faster, encourage the fever (not too too much), eat lots of garlic, use a neti pot, force fluids, and stay in bed. You'll be better maybe a day sooner. Maybe more, but probably a day. Since most upper respiratory viruses last 1-2 weeks, that's probably not enough for you.

To make the symptoms go away (and hope you can still fight off the bug in the meantime), you need to discourage your immune system a little (after all, the symptoms are you, not the bug). The following will help:

acetominphen (tylenol) is better at reducing fever than ibuprofen, but don't take it if you're an alcoholic (in which case, you have other problems). Massive doses of vitamin C will probably make you feel better, though at this point they won't help you get better (they reduce your radical oxygen species load, thus reducing symptoms at the expense of microbial killing power).

[mistergoat]

Wow, thanks for such a detailed response

[chilimuffin]

Actually, I think his tylenol+ibuprofen suggestion has merit - the ibuprofen is like a background control, and the tylenol does the hard work. They have different pharmacological actions and are metabolized differently, so the dosing is fine (you want to use less than 4000 mg of tylenol a day and there's a lot of wiggle room with ibuprofen dosing).

My warning was about drowsiness :). chlortrimeton by itself will most likely make you a little drowsy unless you're not prone to side effects in general. "Non-drowsy" is usually a formulation that combines an antihistamine with a decongestant (for example Chlortrimeton-D, or the generic "Walfinate-D" at Walgreen's). In a lot of states those are behind the pharmacy window now because of the fear that someone will buy tons of the decongestant (pseudoephedrine) to make meth.

[mistergoat]

there's a lot of wiggle room with ibuprofen dosing

So it would probably be cool for me to take 600 mg of ibuprofen? Cuz 400 mg of ibuprofen and 650 (two pills) of acetominophen don't seem to be getting my fever to go away. It was still around 100 when I last checked.

[arksnay]

I can't add anything to the very comprehensive post above, except that I am sick too and feel your pain.

Just don't take Tylenol's Severe Cold Symptoms medication. I am on that right now and it's really messing me up. One of my staff said she took it once and it made her hallucinate.

[mistergoat]

Sorry you're sick too! Hope you feel better soon. And I can add that to my list of medicines to avoid--a list which currently includes Allegra D, which made me jitterier than David Byrne performing "Psycho Killer".

Hope they call you soon! The delay is probably just because they're a big and busy organization, not to mention the whole CIA-tape destruction news. Not that this helps, but there you go.

[dancingwolfgrrl]

How close to done are you? At this point, I'd probably take drugs and sleep as much as I needed to and workwork in between. Good luck!