Flu season home cures smell like love

It starts with the sniffle, the drip in your nose, the scratchy throat that you hope you can sleep off, but instead it intensifies and lingers. “But I was just sick,” I howled over winter vacation. My husband took up the complaint a few days later; he thought he’d escaped the cold that battered Didi, then Gege, then me and finally him. Getting sick again seemed unfair, but life is anything

but fair. Even though I’d washed my hands at every chance, sprayed and wiped down surfaces as if we were in a surgical ward, we all succumbed to the illness that has carried into the new year.

In the Bay Area, the flu season has gotten off to an early and severe start, and medical experts say that the latest vaccine has been disappointing in terms of warding off the most widely circulated strain. But I suppose some protection is better than none. Fortunately, when our household falls ill again, or suffers from assorted aches and scrapes — and we will, we most definitely will — we can call upon advice from readers who shared their childhood cures, some of which sound soothing and healing, and some of which it seems they were lucky to have survived!

Charles Huddleston suggested warm milk and honey. “Comforting but not good for a cold. Cold baths for a fever. Hot water running in a sink, for the steam, to ease congestion,” said Huddleston, who’s 75. He also recalled an oily yellow liquid concocted by a friend’s father in the basement. “We had it put on cuts, poured in sore ears, and we forced it down orally as a cure for general sickness. It was supposedly root beer flavored. Imagine root-beer-flavored motor oil! It was my late teens before I could stand root beer.”

He waxed fondly about BFI Powder, based upon the antimicrobial sulfa, which dried up wounds. Likewise, Jean Abbe recalled how, back when she was a kid, her mother used to make trips to Mexico to buy the powder, which had just come on the market, to treat cold and fevers.

American soldiers carried pouches of sulfa powder during World War II to sprinkle on open wounds, which helped reduce the mortality rate. Stronger antibiotics later emerged and became more prevalent, though sulfa remains in use — just not over the counter. (I found preparations available for fish, dogs and horses, but not intended for humans!)

For infected toes, Abbe’s mother prepared soaks in extremely hot water “straight from the boiling teakettle.”

“As soon as I could stand to put my foot in the water for more than a few seconds, she would pour in more boiling water,” said Abbe, 78. “Then she would apply a ‘bread and milk poultice’ to ‘draw out the poison.’ ”

When another reader came down with whooping cough — in the days before vaccines — her Russian grandmother boiled chopped onions with honey into syrup. “It was about the grossest thing I ever tasted, but it worked,” she said. “The cough was no more. To me it was a miracle. Would I use it now? No way.” For colds, her parents applied mustard plasters, and her Norwegian father made her and her brother hot water, sugar and whiskey at bedtime, to keep coughs in check. To me, that sounds far more delicious than NyQuil, and the sort of concoction you might see at a craft cocktail bar — locally sourced, of course.

What goes around comes around. A friend of mine, also from a Chinese immigrant family, said they applied Tiger Balm ointment on their temples for headaches and around belly buttons for stomachaches. “Now it cracks me up that my CrossFit gym mates arrive with the aroma of Tiger Balm on them, having rubbed it all over their muscles,” she said.

Something about the sense of smell reaches into our reptilian brain and can instantly transport us back to our earliest memories, to those moments that might have been mostly wordless but nonetheless remain deeply felt and deeply remembered.

Sandy Malloy’s mother used to apply Vicks VapoRub when she came down with a cold. “My mother would put it around my nose and then on my chest, and would cover my chest with a rag so I wouldn't get my nightgown dirty,” she said. “Then I would go to bed and invariably wake up with the rag somewhere other than my chest. My mother and I didn't always have a perfect relationship but that treatment made me feel loved, even if it only did a little bit for my breathing.”

And isn’t that what we’re looking for as part of any cure, whether traditional or modern, panacea or placebo?

When one reader came down with whooping cough, her Russian grandmother boiled chopped onions with honey into syrup.