The Way Back to Life
As stated elsewhere, the information on this blog (and other blogs of mine) is best used to help create a better future for the next generation, not to provide miracle cures for people in dire straits. One reason for that is because if you are real far gone, the road to recovery is long, hard and uncertain and most people will NOT want to hear what I have to say about it.
A theme of all of my health writing is we are products of our environment and study after study after study says that diet and lifestyle play major roles in every deadly disease known to mankind. And, yet, if you tell people "I use diet and lifestyle to manage my deadly dread disease" they will literally call you crazy to your face. Because most humans are such shit, basically
I spent about 3.5 months bedridden and stopped being bedridden about a month before I was finally diagnosed with atypical cystic fibrosis. This happened OVERNIGHT due to some of the home remedies I was using to manage my situation in the face of doctors ordering tests, denying me treatment because "we don't know what is wrong with you" and asking if I wanted to see a shrink when my reply to that was "I could DIE before you figure out what's wrong with me. GIVE ME ANTIBIOTICS."
Because if you are DEATHLY ILL and doctors are DENYING YOU any kind of treatment, OBVIOUSLY being AFRAID YOU MIGHT DIE is a clear sign of a mental health issue and being out of touch with reality. Sure. Let's go with that NUTSO theory because you are the high paid asshole in a white coat with a spiffy title and I am the person DYING.
So in the face of doctors being useless assholes, (among other things) I was very consistently doing the following:
And after that I stopped being bedridden. I stopped sleeping up to 20 hours a day. I was able to get up out of bed and go SIT in the living room or dining room and give my sons verbal instructions for how to cook and do laundry, which began to improve our quality of life and took some of the burden off my overworked husband.
I lived in a crappy apartment and previous tenants had been smokers. There was NOT adequate hot water to make an adequately hot bath for my medical purposes.
So we boiled two big pots of water and poured those into the tub FIRST, heating the tub and putting hot water in the tub, before running tap water into the tub. This meant the apartment was constantly steamy -- very steamy -- and brown gunk ran down the walls that made it look like the walls were bleeding human blood. We eventually concluded this was residue from previous tenants smoking being steamed out of the walls.
After my diagnosis, I continued the hot baths for a time and ALSO began routinely boiling medical equipment on the stovetop to sterilize it. Boiling medical equipment is probably a pretty common practice for people with serious conditions.
Long story short, I eventually realized that mold in this apartment was an issue and I began throwing things out, starting with my mattress which had been gifted to me. It was a used mattress and other people had slept on it for years before I owned it and it had spent some months in storage at some point, so it contained mold and goodness knows what else.
Some top priorities for things to throw out if you are very ill and trying to break the cycle of illness:
In short, cloth is a bad thing. Try to have LESS OF IT. And "less is more" GENERALLY.
A relatively painless way for most Americans to start this process is go clean out your closets and get rid of that yogurt maker you have had for multiple YEARS and NEVER ACTUALLY USED but you STILL have GOOD INTENTIONS of doing so -- SOMEDAY (yes, that is a real example from my actual life).
Toss clothes that you haven't worn in the last year (or TWO if a year is just too much for you to take right now) but are keeping "in case I gain/lose weight." You will get healthier faster without that stuff growing god-knows-what in a DARK, DAMP closet somewhere.
Work on getting the humidity down. You may want to buy some Damp Rid and stick it in the closets of your home.
BUT, the good news is having less paper, cloth, etc in the home will help bring the humidity down. Crazy-sounding but true story:
During my divorce, I and my two teenaged sons moved in with relatives and the three of us occupied a single bedroom for nearly a year. We slept there, we kept all our possessions there and we stored SOME of the food we ate in that room, separate from the kitchen pantry for the rest of the family.
This was in Georgia, which is very hot and humid in the summer, and initially we had trouble sleeping because the room just stayed too hot and humid, especially when it was warm.
I have no idea why we did this, but one day we took all the cans of sodas out of the cardboard boxes and threw the boxes out and took other food items out of the cardboard boxes and repackaged some of it in Ziploc bags. And suddenly the room was cool and dry enough to be comfortable.
We thought we were imagining this. Like "Noooo, that can't be."
But there happened to be a thermometer in the window of this room and on subsequent occasions we were able to determine by repeating this that the temperature consistently dropped five degrees Fahrenheit whenever we removed all the cardboard from the food supplies stored in our room.
So it eventually became policy to take everything out of the cardboard box and throw away the cardboard box right after we got all the groceries home. We STILL do this.
At the risk of ACTUALLY sounding like the nutter people imagine me to be:
Cardboard and papers make me really ill these days and my suspicion is this is NOT entirely due to my health issues because this was NOT an issue in my childhood. So my suspicion is this is related to how much paper products get recycled these days, so stuff gets gross and they bleach it or whatever and god knows what is accumulating in our recycled paper products.
I also do NOT let junk mail accummulate. If it's junk mail, it goes in the trash and out the house promptly.
At some point, after slagging my bulb syringes and what not AGAIN on the stove, we came up with an alternate method for sterilizing medical devices and to my shock no longer boiling medical devices daily meant the air quality in my home went way, way up without making any other changes.
Over time, I began looking for non-mechanical means to do the things I NEED to happen to keep my defective body working, such as a methodology for doing lung clearance that doesn't involve any medical devices. If there are no medical devices involved in clearing my lungs, hey, nothing needs to be sterilized!
Get the humidity down. Get rid of SOFT products as MUCH as possible. This will help reduce mold in the home and reduce the ability of germs to infect your home and then re-infect you, thereby keeping you sick no matter how many drugs you take.
The way back to life starts with improving your environment because you are a product of your environment. If you are very ill and largely housebound, upping your game on keeping your home clean and improving air quality without adding a lot of strong chemical cleaners to do so is one of the first steps that must happen to find your way back.
A theme of all of my health writing is we are products of our environment and study after study after study says that diet and lifestyle play major roles in every deadly disease known to mankind. And, yet, if you tell people "I use diet and lifestyle to manage my deadly dread disease" they will literally call you crazy to your face. Because most humans are such shit, basically
I spent about 3.5 months bedridden and stopped being bedridden about a month before I was finally diagnosed with atypical cystic fibrosis. This happened OVERNIGHT due to some of the home remedies I was using to manage my situation in the face of doctors ordering tests, denying me treatment because "we don't know what is wrong with you" and asking if I wanted to see a shrink when my reply to that was "I could DIE before you figure out what's wrong with me. GIVE ME ANTIBIOTICS."
Because if you are DEATHLY ILL and doctors are DENYING YOU any kind of treatment, OBVIOUSLY being AFRAID YOU MIGHT DIE is a clear sign of a mental health issue and being out of touch with reality. Sure. Let's go with that NUTSO theory because you are the high paid asshole in a white coat with a spiffy title and I am the person DYING.
So in the face of doctors being useless assholes, (among other things) I was very consistently doing the following:
- Taking a daily hot bath.
- Having a nightcap every night even though I don't like alcohol.
- Having someone put a mixture of Everclear (a high proof alcohol) and baking soda on my back after my hot bath.
And after that I stopped being bedridden. I stopped sleeping up to 20 hours a day. I was able to get up out of bed and go SIT in the living room or dining room and give my sons verbal instructions for how to cook and do laundry, which began to improve our quality of life and took some of the burden off my overworked husband.
I lived in a crappy apartment and previous tenants had been smokers. There was NOT adequate hot water to make an adequately hot bath for my medical purposes.
So we boiled two big pots of water and poured those into the tub FIRST, heating the tub and putting hot water in the tub, before running tap water into the tub. This meant the apartment was constantly steamy -- very steamy -- and brown gunk ran down the walls that made it look like the walls were bleeding human blood. We eventually concluded this was residue from previous tenants smoking being steamed out of the walls.
After my diagnosis, I continued the hot baths for a time and ALSO began routinely boiling medical equipment on the stovetop to sterilize it. Boiling medical equipment is probably a pretty common practice for people with serious conditions.
Long story short, I eventually realized that mold in this apartment was an issue and I began throwing things out, starting with my mattress which had been gifted to me. It was a used mattress and other people had slept on it for years before I owned it and it had spent some months in storage at some point, so it contained mold and goodness knows what else.
Some top priorities for things to throw out if you are very ill and trying to break the cycle of illness:
- Books and papers.
- Mattresses, bedding and upholstered furniture.
- Anything old that has ever been stored in a storeroom, shed, etc. (cough -- CHRISTMAS decorations -- cough)
- Particle board furniture.
In short, cloth is a bad thing. Try to have LESS OF IT. And "less is more" GENERALLY.
A relatively painless way for most Americans to start this process is go clean out your closets and get rid of that yogurt maker you have had for multiple YEARS and NEVER ACTUALLY USED but you STILL have GOOD INTENTIONS of doing so -- SOMEDAY (yes, that is a real example from my actual life).
Toss clothes that you haven't worn in the last year (or TWO if a year is just too much for you to take right now) but are keeping "in case I gain/lose weight." You will get healthier faster without that stuff growing god-knows-what in a DARK, DAMP closet somewhere.
Work on getting the humidity down. You may want to buy some Damp Rid and stick it in the closets of your home.
BUT, the good news is having less paper, cloth, etc in the home will help bring the humidity down. Crazy-sounding but true story:
During my divorce, I and my two teenaged sons moved in with relatives and the three of us occupied a single bedroom for nearly a year. We slept there, we kept all our possessions there and we stored SOME of the food we ate in that room, separate from the kitchen pantry for the rest of the family.
This was in Georgia, which is very hot and humid in the summer, and initially we had trouble sleeping because the room just stayed too hot and humid, especially when it was warm.
I have no idea why we did this, but one day we took all the cans of sodas out of the cardboard boxes and threw the boxes out and took other food items out of the cardboard boxes and repackaged some of it in Ziploc bags. And suddenly the room was cool and dry enough to be comfortable.
We thought we were imagining this. Like "Noooo, that can't be."
But there happened to be a thermometer in the window of this room and on subsequent occasions we were able to determine by repeating this that the temperature consistently dropped five degrees Fahrenheit whenever we removed all the cardboard from the food supplies stored in our room.
So it eventually became policy to take everything out of the cardboard box and throw away the cardboard box right after we got all the groceries home. We STILL do this.
At the risk of ACTUALLY sounding like the nutter people imagine me to be:
Cardboard and papers make me really ill these days and my suspicion is this is NOT entirely due to my health issues because this was NOT an issue in my childhood. So my suspicion is this is related to how much paper products get recycled these days, so stuff gets gross and they bleach it or whatever and god knows what is accumulating in our recycled paper products.
I also do NOT let junk mail accummulate. If it's junk mail, it goes in the trash and out the house promptly.
At some point, after slagging my bulb syringes and what not AGAIN on the stove, we came up with an alternate method for sterilizing medical devices and to my shock no longer boiling medical devices daily meant the air quality in my home went way, way up without making any other changes.
Over time, I began looking for non-mechanical means to do the things I NEED to happen to keep my defective body working, such as a methodology for doing lung clearance that doesn't involve any medical devices. If there are no medical devices involved in clearing my lungs, hey, nothing needs to be sterilized!
Get the humidity down. Get rid of SOFT products as MUCH as possible. This will help reduce mold in the home and reduce the ability of germs to infect your home and then re-infect you, thereby keeping you sick no matter how many drugs you take.
The way back to life starts with improving your environment because you are a product of your environment. If you are very ill and largely housebound, upping your game on keeping your home clean and improving air quality without adding a lot of strong chemical cleaners to do so is one of the first steps that must happen to find your way back.
Footnotes
If you have already read through the entire site, you should be familiar with the idea that you should plan to have some downtime after throwing things out. Throwing out contaminated items making you sick will cause you to feel pretty bad for at least 48 hours and possibly a week or longer.The 48-Hour Rule: Two days after doing something significant I typically feel like hell.Some quick links: Removing cardboard, etc, drops the temperature and humidity and most likely it is because cardboard et al is more or less slowly rotting. Kind of the same reason hay bails catch fire.
Strange as it may seem at first, wet hay is more likely to spontaneously catch fire than dry hay...So most likely, you are not only dropping the humidity of the space, you are reducing your overall exposure to microbes when you remove cardboard, upholstered furniture, books, papers, etc.
High-moisture hay initially heats up as the plant material continues to respire after harvest and microorganisms such as fungi and bacteria break down complex carbohydrates.
