Teleidoscope

Thu, Feb 21, 2008

Not Strep 2

Posted at 11:59 am MST to Miscellaneous

Today is an official sick day. I sent emails saying I was sick and went back to bed. About 11am I got a call from my doctor's office saying that the cultures came back negative for bacteria, so this crud is, as I expected, viral.

I'm eating breakfast now -- just buttered toast -- then I'll go back to bed, maybe with a book this time. I think I'm about slept out, but I don't cough when I am fully horizontal.

I've been off St. John's Wort for the better part of a year, but it has occurred to me that some of the miserable exhaustion I've been feeling may be neurochemical, so I took a couple of capsules with my breakfast.

I remember when I first started taking St. John's Wort, on a Friday after reading a Time magazine special issue on depression. About the middle of the morning on the following Monday my boss said "Wow, you're in a good mood today." So I knew the capsules were making difference.

That's a bit like my introduction to chromium piccolinate, after reading that there was evidence it helped stave off and treat diabetes, as well as being good for low blood sugar (which I have always had problems with). I took a chromium capsule in the morning, and at my mid-morning tea break I found that putting in my usual amount of sugar made the tea disgustingly sweet. I take a 200 unit chromium along with my vitamins, on the days I take vitamins. (I really need to figure out which supplement aggravates the swallowing problem and get back to taking the others more regularly.)

Selenium, which is used by the thyroid, doesn't seem to do a thing for me. The doctors tried to deliberately shut my thyroid down before I had the hemithyroidectomy, and I suspect the half of my thyroid that remains in there is still non-functional, so there is nothing to use the selenium.

My supplements include a multivitamin, additional B, C, D, and E, the chromium, glucosamine-chondroitin, and flaxseed oil. I'm suspicious that I may be sensitive to the glucosamine-chondroitin, in addition to having trouble finding it in sizes that I can swallow, but my reaction pattern is not being very predictable.

Today I'm just taking the St. John's Wort and chromium, to try to get my energy levels up without inflicting all th eother stuff on my stomach, which isn't very interested in food or anything else. I ate breakfast at 11 because I was blood-sugar-hungry, not because my stomach was complaining about not being filled.

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