The childhood cures that work for adults

Despite getting my flu shot early — and feeling virtuous — pride goes before fall and I ended up flattened twice in three weeks. It could have been something I picked up from Gege and Didi — aren’t children and mosquitoes vectors of disease? Yet both have been more resilient than me this cold and flu season. “Take it easy!” a friend ordered. “Don’t write so much,” my mother said.

With looming work, that was easier said than done, but after I took care of immediate deadlines, I got in bed, feeling too foggy-headed to concentrate. I quaffed generic NyQuil and fell into the heavy, dreamless, drymouthed slumber that each syrupy, jewel-toned dose promises. When awake, I sucked on menthol-laden Ricola, trying to ease the ache in my throat, blew my nose endlessly and sipped ginger tea with honey and lemon. I despaired, feeling like I was at the bottom of a well, at the bottom of the ocean.

My thoughts roamed to the cures I received as a child. If I had a cough, my grandmother gave me a spoonful of Chinese loquat syrup, sticky and sweet, dark and heavy as midnight, as engine oil, that I chased down with a glass of water. For assorted aches and pains, she had a jar of Tiger Balm, the camphor and menthol-scented, cure-all ointment. We possessed nothing stronger than that in the house, acetaminophen or aspirin. We didn’t even have a thermometer — a paradox, if you consider that my scientist mother has a lab full of shiny equipment capable of precise measurements.

To check if we were feverish, she’d press her palm against our forehead, and then against hers, comparing the difference in heat. Yet nowadays, if we call the pediatrician or advice nurse about the twins, the temperature is among the first questions they ask.

Though I’ve never asked my mother, I assumed her family had gotten by without a thermometer when she was growing up in China and Taiwan, and that’s why we did without one, too. A digression: My mother once told me a story about one of her brothers, when he was a little boy, in the grip of a high fever. Penicillin had been discovered in 1928 in London, but in the decade that followed, such a treatment was still new and experimental in China. When my grandparents acquired enough of the expensive drug to save their son, it must have seemed like a miracle, like magic.

Somehow, my brother, sister and I survived our childhoods, even without over-the-counter medications and thermometers. We were fortunate that we never suffered anything more serious. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I tried Advil for the first time. It amazed me. You could make the pain go away, just like that!

As for my husband, he fondly remembers sick days in his childhood: getting propped up on pillows in his parents’ bed, where he watched old television reruns such as “Bonanza,” in the days before cartoons were on tap anytime you wanted. He nibbled on cinnamon toast, dined on chicken noodle soup and drank glass after glass of apple juice (the last of which he still downs when he’s under the weather). He’d also get Vicks VapoRub on his chest when he had a stuffy nose. Consequently, we keep a jar around that we never used until last week, when Gege was stuffed up; I thought about how he might start associating it with his childhood, and how he might turn to it to comfort his kids someday.

Getting sick as an adult is no fun, especially if the whole house goes down. A couple of years back, in the weeks before Christmas, the twins fell ill, then I did, and then my husband. Snuggling and snotty, we slept, we read, we watched movies in bed and might have continue to wallow through the holidays if not for Didi, who threw up, forcing us to get up and change the sheets. On Christmas Day, my husband dragged himself to the emergency room because his eardrum had burst due to his congested sinuses. Meanwhile, I rushed Gege to urgent care because his fever spiked again.

We didn’t manage to open our gifts that day. Worse Christmas ever? And yet to call it that would imply that we didn’t laugh long and hard, and cough at dinner — celebrating our shared genetics, shared blood and shared virus.

What were your childhood cures, and do you hold onto them still?

Somehow, my brother, sister and I survived our childhoods, even without over-the-counter medications and thermometers.