There aren't many days that I'm actually sick to the point of not being able to do some useful work, but today was basically one of those. I managed to reply to a few work e-mails, but mostly I have just been sitting around all day, or napping. It's 4:07 PM and I'm still wearing my pajamas. My energy level is low, I'm achy, and my skin feels hypersensitive to any sort of touch. I called the blood center to let them know, following my platelet apheresis on Tuesday, and they said they'll check with one of the docs, but given that the symptom onset was several days after the donation, the product should be okay.
I suspect that I've got a bug that has been going around at my office. It's almost like a cold without respiratory involvement. I'm hopeful I'll shake it off by tomorrow. I'm sucking on Cold-Eeze Zinc Gluconate lozenges every few hours. They claim to have clinical backing for their claim of shortening cold symptoms. A quick Google search lands me here, at an abstract on a study of Cold-Eeze, with several links to related studies. It looks like these studies use incidental colds, and it would be really interesting to see a controlled lab study in which they spray rhinovirus up the noses of healthy college students, and then as soon as they exhibit symptoms, give half of them Cold-eeze and the other half placebos. (These studies are, obviously, more expensive and difficult to do, especially with large test groups.)
Oooh, here's a study linking my previous musings on the power of sleep with rhinovirus susceptibility... Again, the study is fairly small, but they really did give the participants rhinovirus nose drops and then see if they got sick. The differences were pretty stark. On that note, maybe I'll go lie down again...
No comments:
Post a Comment