lost my voice again

[ritaxis]

I'm pretty sure the weird feeling in the space above my missing teeth was a sinus infection in waiting all along. I'm pretty sure that what I've got going now is a sinus infection full-blown.

And I'm very sure that I am very, very tired of losing my voice every time I get any kind of respiratory thing. And I'm really irritated that the ear nose and throat specialist I saw a while back spent five minutes dismissing the hoarseness that brought me in to him after a month and a half of it.

I'm not whispering, but I can't carry a tune either, and that's a crucial part of my professional toolkit.

On another front: peanut butter and celery now seems to me to be a breakfast pastry.

Oh, and department of (nearly) irreproducible recipes: I have made a hot vinegar by loosely half-filling a tall baby food jar (guess where I got that from) with baby wild radish seed pods and flowers and then filling it up with rice vinegar. It's lovely to look at, but I won't taste it for a little while longer. This can only be done in May: before that, there are not enough seed pods, and after that, there are not enough undeveloped ones. I am sure ripe ones would make a satisfactory vinegar, but I am thinking that the unripe ones will make a satisfactory quick pickle also. They get tough as soon as you can tell they have seeds in them. I know this because I started using them in salads last year or the year before. I think it only takes them a week or so after the flower withers to get tough.

Still working overtime, but a little less now, since I'm not having to stay so late. Writing a few sentences here and there.

Comments

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

Ginger tea.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

So -- do you use the root? Do you grate it or pop chunks of it into the water? Boil it or steep it? (or both?) eep -- dried or fresh? Is the point just to blow out the sinuses or is there some other principle involved?

I'm really interested in this.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

I pop peeled slices of the root into water, then boil & steep. (I guess you could crush it first if you want to make it even stronger.)Usually it's sweetened (sugar or honey) but that's optional.
It's a traditional Filipino remedy for any throat ailment, specially hoarseness. (But it's also a blood thinner, just so you know. )

I don't think we have a traditional sinus remedy though -- the local humidity usually solves that by itself. I did read in consumer reports health that saline sinus irrigation supposedly works (neti pots, etc), as does honey for coughs, and chicken soup for colds.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

It's what I use for sore throat and nausea, too. But I cheat. I take candied ginger, cut it into tiny dice, put at the bottom of a mug, and pour boiling water over. When it's cool enough to drink, I do, and then there's all the little spicy bits of ginger to eat at the bottom.

[momomom.livejournal.com]

I had a lot of fun letting domestic red radishes going to seed one year and eating the young pods. There are some types that are grown for the pods, not the root.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1475066

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Really: I didn't know that. I did know that people eat the pods. The wild radishes are supposedly exactly the same as the domestic ones, but I've never seen a bolted French Breakfast grow to six feet. The wild ones usually grow more like four, but you can get lost in them sometimes.

Okay, I read the everything article but I don't understand what everything is exactly. I was very interested in all the radish detail: I'm going to reread that later.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ack. I hope you feel better soon. Suddenly peanut butter and celery sounds really good, but I don't have any celery.