Oh my, but we are tired of the rain here in the Southeast -- middle Tennessee, in particular, but all around us it's soaking wet.
I don't complain about the rain much, and it seldom affects my mood or sense of well being. But we have had SO MUCH rain that I'm beginning to be weary of it all and it just might start putting me in a bad mood.
But hope springs eternal, and it appears we are done with the rain and dreariness for a while. We woke yesterday morning and this morning to beautiful sunshine. It's cold, but I can take the cold if it's just not wet for a while.
I wrote those first two paragraphs a few days ago, then got distracted with something. I'm pleased to say the bad mood never came, but it was getting close.
To go with the yucky weather, there is all kinds of sickness around. There is an ongoing debate about whether the cold temperatures make us sick. My parents and their peers all believed it religiously, and that's how I was raised. Going out in "night air," walking around barefoot, going outside in chilly temperatures without proper clothing, going outside with wet hair -- all of these made me a candidate for sickness in my growing-up years.
When I raised my own children and relaxed those rules a bit, every time one of them got sick, 90 percent of the time, my parents and parents-in-law attributed it to their being cold. Passive-aggressive comments and not so passive-aggressive comments were duly noted.
I have to wonder what my folks might have thought a few weeks ago when I was diagnosed with pneumonia. It was Super Bowl Sunday and I had been fighting a cold for about a week. I thought I was feeling better but over the weekend the cough became worse.
I told Wife that Sunday morning, to be on the safe side, I was going to go to a walk-in clinic and get checked out. The doc there listened to me breathe with her stethoscope and said, "I think you have pneumonia."
I requested that she listen again because surely that could not be correct. Another listen and a chest x-ray confirmed her suspicions. Right then and there she made me put on a mask, told me to cancel my Super Bowl watching plans and stay home and rest for at least the next three days. That, along with a breathing treatment and an antibiotic, seemed to do the trick.
Somewhere my parents are shaking their heads, saying they knew I would eventually get sick if I kept going outside without a heavy-enough coat on.
8 comments:
Sorry to hear about your pneumonia. When you linked it to the Super Bowl, I was thinking that might have been the reason, but it sounded like you got sick before the game (maybe you were a New Orleans fan). Seriously, I hope you are quickly on the mend. It has been wet here, too, this winter, but without the cold.
www.thepulpitandthepen.com
Thanks, Jeff. Honestly had very little interest in the Super Bowl, but my wife had invited a few folks over to watch it. Unfortunately, they had to change their plans as I was quarantined!
It sounds like your winter is exactly the same as ours except for the cold and rainy part. We've been frigid and snowy and it is getting tiresome. I spent a month driving around on roads which I couldn't see because of all the snow and ice covering them. Finally we are getting bare patches and huge lakes forming (which unfortunately obscure the obscenely deep potholes) and they refreeze every evening making things sporty when driving around town.
As for proof that your parents and their peers are incorrect about how we get sick in the winter, one only has to look at places that are cold all year round such as Antarctica where sicknesses only come twice a year with the shift change in personnel. Once everyone has shared their colds and recovered, they remain sickness free until the next shift change six months later.
If my parents were still around, Ed, they would not be convinced! 😊
I wondered if you all were well. There is a lot of sickness going around everywhere, it seems like. I am sorry that you are ill.
I taught the classes in the Army...the ones that required me to say "Cold doesn't cause colds, viruses cause colds." There were always people that wanted to argue me to DEATH on that one point.
Bob! I had no idea you'd been sick! I'm glad you're better now.
I don't think my mother adhered to those ideas since I can remember a lot of bare feet and wet heads (and not just mine, but hers!).
Rather than worrying about the cold, we should be vigilant about washing our hands. Oh... and we've had our fair share of rain this month, too. In fact, we've had more than a foot since the start of the year. (and little Pat does not like a cold, wet combo)
Yes I’m much better now. Really never felt that bad. Think I went to the doc just in time.
I'll hope to see some beautiful springtime photos of Tennessee here! I remember the conventional wisdom always being that if one went out in the rain one would get sick. I always thought that was total hogwash, but the one time I had pneumonia--at age twenty-three--came after going for a run in a September rain storm. Maybe there's something to it.
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