COVID – 19 Ecuador: Perhaps Helpful Information Part 4

CORONA Common Sense:
Written by a Respiratory therapist to help fight the COVID – 19.
Common sense wisdom with those that have the virus and trying to stay home. To improve your chance of survival.

This applies to the otherwise generally healthy population, so use discretion.

Only high temperatures kill a virus, so let your fever run high. Tylenol, Advil. Motrin, Ibuprofen, etc. will bring your fever down allowing the virus to live longer. They are saying that ibuprofen, Advil, etc will actually exacerbate the virus. Use common sense and don’t let your fever go over 103 or 104 if you got the guts. If it gets higher than that take your Tylenol, not ibuprofen or Advil to keep it regulated. It helps to keep the house warm and cover up with blankets so the body does not have to work so hard to generate the heat. It usually takes about 3 days of this to break the fever.

1. The body is going to dehydrate with the elevated temperature so you must rehydrate yourself regularly, whether you like it or not. Gatorade with real sugar, or Pedialyte with real sugar for kids, works well. Why the sugar? Sugar will give your body back the energy it is using up to create the fever. The electrolytes and fluid you are losing will also be replenished by Gatorade. If you don’t do this and end up in the hospital they will start an IV and give you D5W (sugar water) and Normal Saline to replenish electrolytes. Gatorade is much cheaper, pain-free, and comes in an assortment of flavors
2. You must keep your lungs moist. Best done by taking long steamy showers on a regular basis, if you wheezing or congested use a real minty toothpaste and brush your teeth while taking the steamy shower, and deep breath through your mouth. This will provide some bronchial dilation and help loosen the phlegm. Force yourself to cough into a wet washcloth pressed firmly over your mouth and nose, which will cause greater pressure in your lungs forcing them to expand more and break loose more of the congestion.
3. Eat healthily and regularly. Gotta keep your strength up.
4. Once the fever breaks, start moving around to get the body back in shape and blood circulating.
5. Deep breath on a regular basis, even when it hurts. If you don’t it becomes easy to develop pneumonia. Pursed lip breathing really helps. That’s breathing in deep and slow then exhaling through tight lips as if your blowing out a candle, blow until you have completely emptied your lungs and you will be able to breathe in an even deeper breath. This helps keep your lungs expanded as well as increase your oxygen level.
6. Remember that every medication you take is merely relieving the symptoms, not making you well.
7. If you still think you are dying then hopefully the hospital will have a bed for you.
   

Timeless! History repeats itself, The poem below was written in 1869, and reprinted during 1919 Pandemic.

It was written in 1869 by Kathleen O’Mara:

And people stayed at home
And read books
And listened
And they rested
And did exercises
And made art and played
And learned new ways of being
And stopped and listened
More deeply
Someone meditated, someone prayed
Someone met their shadow
And people began to think differently
And people healed.
And in the absence of people who
Lived in ignorant ways
Dangerous, meaningless, and heartless,
The earth also began to heal
And when the danger ended and
People found themselves
They grieved for the dead
And made new choices
And dreamed of new visions
And created new ways of living
And completely healed the earth
Just as they were healed.

While history does repeat itself you should be filled with faith and hope that this too will pass.

Y’all be safe out there for right now it is a dangerous world