This has been quite a week! Rebecca and I returned from a fantastic conference in beautiful Lake Tahoe on Sunday afternoon. On Monday, my dad went into the hospital having had a mini stroke. He's going to be ok, praise God. Tuesday, Sarina started throwing up and blessed the rest of our family with illness for the rest of the week! All but one of us have had this stomach virus to varying degrees. We tried a couple of interesting things to combat the virus this time. First, we all started taking activated charcoal to try and nip the sickness in the bud. You see, activated charcoal adsorbs (not absorbs) all sorts of viruses and toxins. So if you ingest it, it will bind to the bad things in your gut and take it out. My hope was if we all started on it right away, the virus wouldn't be able to get established in our systems. No such luck. The charcoal may have lessened the symptoms, though. Most of us only threw up four or five times, and some not at all. And recovery seemed to be quicker, too. So it wasn't the miracle cure I was hoping for, but it seemed to help some.
The second really cool thing I did was give enemas to my really sick ones. I know, it sounds weird. But I felt it was worth sharing, because it made a big difference. The logic behind giving an enema is that if the patient cannot hold fluids down, you can introduce fluids into their digestive tract from the other direction. I just put some electrolyte, honey and charcoal into an enema and then squeezed it into my patient's rectum. I can't say they were so excited about this treatment. But I noticed that for those who were very sick it kept them from getting dehydrated.
I also made homemade electrolyte out of 1/3 calcium water (boil a whole egg for 20 minutes in water and the shell will let calcium into the water), 1/3 juice and 1/3 hibiscus tea. I also added honey to sweeten it. Then I put in salt to taste and there you go, no yucky artificial sweeteners in my electrolyte!
So that's what's been on my mind. Nothing too profound, but maybe the info will come in handy for you sometime. And, hey, when you're surrounded by puking people, your thoughts don't go too deep anyway! :)
