The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, to start November, a realization I had recently about how to overcome less severe colds.
2024 has been a tough year for me, that is a definite fact. Among all the rough seas of this year have been a series of nearly monthly colds that knocked me down at times when I otherwise would have lived to my fullest potential. I started to see a pattern at the end of July when I developed a cold after spending too much time under an overworked ceiling fan in our living room watching the Summer Olympics on television. A month before, on the morning I was due to drive my parents to the Kansas City International Airport for their summer Mediterranean trip, I woke up to find my voice gone, and after the return drive from the airport I was sapped of any and all energy.
That illness was one of the worst I’ve experienced since the pandemic. I ended up taking a week to do nothing and merely rest and return to my teenage summer hobby of watching television and reading all day. It was perhaps my first weeklong break from working since 2020, if even before. In the following week, even though I was still unwell I wrote two significant papers I needed to complete, and began writing papers for the three conferences I attended at the end of October and on the week of this blog post’s release. I thought I’d learned my lesson, I had a similar summer cold in 2021 after over-exposing myself to the ceiling fan in my bedroom which led to me to being sick throughout my western road trip in Colorado and Utah that year.
And yet, at the end of July of this year I found myself getting sick again in the exact same manner. I figured it was a minor thing, and I adopted the tack I’d first tried out in 2020 at the start of the pandemic of doubling or tripling the amount of water I drank to flush whatever it was out of my system. In both instances, in late June and late July, I stayed home as much as possible, close to the kitchen where I could get more water, and close to my supply of tissue boxes. I’d figure each illness would last for maybe a week, though often they’d end up lasting for 10-14 days. I ended up traveling to Orlando while I was still recovering at the end of July for the National Convention of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) to lobby as a member of the Kansas delegation and spent that week in Florida with a bad cough. When I finally returned home to Kansas City at the end of that trip I slept for a full day, and eventually felt fully recovered the following morning.
I felt lucky to break the cycle at the end of August and not get sick over Labor Day weekend, one of my usual weekends when I’m unwell thanks to my seasonal allergies. I was very careful to avoid overexposing myself to the ceiling fans at home, which are essential to keeping the rooms in our century-old house cool in the increasingly muggy Kansas City summers, and I made sure to pay close attention to my allergies if they would announce themselves while I spent Labor Day weekend outdoors volunteering with the Fr. Donnelly AOH at the Kansas City Irish Fest’s Pershing Gate at the southeast corner of Pershing Rd. and Grand Blvd. The same luck held out at the end of September and beginning of October when I spent a long day outdoors at Wyandotte County Park in my role as Chairman of the Fr. Donnelly AOH’s Irish Road Bowling Tournament. I think I helped myself there by staying in the A-frame shelter that is our tournament’s headquarters for most of the day and avoiding going out onto the park’s lawns.
And yet, the end of October saw this cycle of monthly ailments returning. This time though it wasn’t due to an overactive ceiling fan drying my throat and making it easier for me to get sick. Instead, with the cooling weather and our ongoing drought I waited too long to buy a new humidifier for my bedroom. By the time I bought one, my throat had been sore from dryness for a full 4 days. I woke up on Day 5 to find the dry throat was gone but the congestion and sneezing familiar from late June and late July had arrived. This was a serious worry, as I would be spending the following three weeks traveling to three separate academic conferences in three separate cities in three separate countries here in North America. I figured I could make the first two work, those were in San Antonio and Toronto, but the third in Mérida, Mexico was more worrisome because I knew I would need to use only bottled water there, and so would need to be careful with my weakened immune system traveling to Mexico for the first time.
I will actually be arriving in Mérida on the day this blog post is published, so it remains to be seen how this leg of my “2024 North American Tour” goes.
Despite these worrying signs, I found a glimmer of hope to latch onto on Days 5, 6, and 7 of this late October sickness that helped me realize how I can end this particular cold sooner. Those three days, as well as Day 4 when I bought my new humidifier, I was hard at work at my current employer, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, as a team captain leading teams of ushers during performances. On Day 5 I was less active for most of the performance, staying to my assigned floor and managing affairs there, yet on Days 6 and 7 I signed up to work in a role that took me all throughout the public-facing side of the building. I easily walked a good 15,000 steps during my shifts those two days and was struck by the fact that I was less congested during those shifts than I expected. On Day 7, walking up the grand staircase for the umpteenth time that afternoon it occurred to me that this could prove the merit of President Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of the strenuous life.
As a boy and young man, Roosevelt was beset by a variety of ailments that left him homebound and unable to experience the vigorous life that he dreamed of. So, entering adulthood as a student at Harvard, he began to live out that strenuous life that he’d dreamed of, and slowly but surely worked hard to strengthen his body and rise out of the afflictions that confined his childhood. I’d wondered for a while now how this could have worked, today we often identify people by the ailments they suffer, even identifying ourselves in this manner. It’s good to acknowledge ourselves, yet I wonder if it also keeps our eyes as a species and especially here in the United States focused on what holds us back rather than what will allow us to rise up? During this weekend hard at work though, running up and down stairs and working directly with thousands of my fellow Kansas Citians and visitors to our fountain city, I found that even though I could feel the congestion that beset me, it didn’t control what I was doing. The more I kept moving, the more I kept observing the people around me, and the more I helped those people to have the best experience they could attending the performances on in the building, the better I felt. By the end of my shift on Day 7, while I certainly was congested, my primary physical sensation was exhaustion, which was fitting. Perhaps then this conference tour would be good for my health and would make it easier for me to fully recover. Granted, the congestion I began feeling at the end of October was far less severe than the two colds I caught in June and July of this year. I was reminded over the weekend that if I were sicker, like I was at the end of June, it would be a far different story. Still, perhaps this is a lesson in how to keep the onset of these colds at bay: to keep moving, to keep working, all while drinking double or triple the usual amount of water. Maybe then I too can come close to saying I’m as fit as a bull moose.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 