I’m not ashamed of doing things that aren’t “smart”–things like taking horse paste and inhaling nanoparticles of silver–when all the “smart” people are jumping off a cliff and calling that foolishness “herd immunity”. It’s herd something, anyway. 

This post is for entertainment purposes and is not to be construed as medical advice. Do not attempt this yourself. I’m just telling you what I did. Try whatever you like. But don’t blame or credit me with the results, please. You have been warned.

So, I think I had the Coof–the Rona, the WuFlu, the Illegal Cough–whatever you want to call it. What I did not have, was Covid-19, because that is an ugly, clunky name, and I do not get ugly, clunkily-named illnesses. I didn’t really feel up to leaving the house to get tested once I was sick, so I can’t say for sure what it was. Besides, you’re not supposed to go places when you’re sick. Somebody might catch something. I’ll probably get antibody testing pretty soon and see if I have them.

What I had at first was about 4 days of awful chest congestion, lots of dry coughing, but no drop in pulse-ox. I never lost my sense of smell, that I could tell, but I also wasn’t eating, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it. It felt low in the lungs, unlike asthma, though my albuterol inhaler did ease some of the distress. I was so tired I couldn’t move. I had a low fever and then muscle aches after the fever subsided. It might have just been the flu.

After the first few days, I gave in and took the horse paste, which I should have done the first day. I’ve always been reluctant to medicate. I could cut my hand off and spend several minutes bleeding out while considering whether I really wanted to intervene in nature’s handling of the matter. This works well for me 99% of the time. I have a strong immune system because I let it practice a lot. I’ll go out and lick doorknobs if it’s been too long since I’ve had an illness to spar with.

The day after taking Ivermectin I had most of my energy back, but breathing was still labored. To get an idea of how I should treat myself, I researched how it’s prescribed for other ailments, and how several (mostly successful) experiments specifically for the Cough had been run. I could have taken it daily with little danger of side effects, I figured, but again, I wanted to see if my body could do it on its own. Because of the way I spaced it out, taking notes on how I felt every day, I don’t think it was either placebo effect or coincidence that I improved so quickly after getting my hooves, but I guess it could have been.

Me and My Man

I hung out at that mostly-better level for a while, maybe 3 days. I felt like I was never going to improve further on my own, so I took another dose of the stuff and within a few hours was feeling pretty good. But my breathing was still labored. I wasn’t coughing anything up, even though it felt like I surely had stuff way down in there, and I was having to use my long-neglected asthma inhaler every six to eight hours. It worked to help me breathe, but it didn’t heal me.

I had been doing nebulized hydrogen peroxide (you can do a web search to find instructions if you’re interested), to no detriment as far as I could tell, but also to no avail. I’ve spent the last several weeks living basically normally. I’ve even been doing my workouts at about half my usual intensity, just hoping against hope that I’m not overdoing it. I can’t just sit here and wait until I’m perfectly well. I get bored.

So I was feeling good, almost 100%, but still using my inhaler almost daily. I did finally start coughing some stuff up a week ago, instead of just coughing, but it comes painfully.

Now, I am not going to the doctor unless I absolutely have to. I just don’t do that. It’s a fault of mine. I don’t want anybody to know I’m not invincible, for one thing. I take it as a personal failure when I get sick. Besides, I don’t want to take time out of my busy schedule for an appointment. I also don’t want to take antibiotics or steroids. I don’t want to do a covid test. I don’t want to pay for a consult.

“So what else can I try?”, I wondered. My immune system was clearly unable to finish this thing off on its own.

Last night I was thinking about the hydrogen peroxide treatment, and how that works. To oversimplify the explanation, basically it produces ROS in the tissues which then destroy any bacteria or viruses that they encounter. The H2O2/saline solution, applied several times, was not doing what it should, but I couldn’t think why. It really should work. Maybe it just isn’t powerful enough because I stubbornly let the bug settle in and get comfortable for too long instead of treating immediately.

So I started thinking, there is another substance that I know does the same thing. I’ve taken it internally plenty of times, though not by inhalation. What if I try direct application of colloidal silver? I went on a hunt for literature on nebulizing the stuff, because I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Well, what do you know? People do that! Granted, they’re all slightly crazy, but who isn’t these days? So after some research (on a barely explored topic, unfortunately), and a prayer that I’m not doing something completely stupid, I went ahead and diluted some colloidal silver with distilled water and spent ten minutes with my nebulizer this morning. Immediately, I coughed up a bunch of yellow gunk, and the quality of my breathing for the rest of the morning has been perfect, as if I’d never had even a cold. I am still occasionally coughing stuff up, but not painfully. The sputum tastes like silver, which you probably don’t care to know.

I’ll let you know tomorrow, after I do another treatment tonight, if I’ve made it through a full 36 hours without breathing difficulties. If I do, that will be the first time in about six weeks. Yes, that is how long I’ve let this thing go on. I know I’m an idiot for not doing more, sooner, but I really wanted to figure this out for myself.

Besides, I have a lot of faith in my immune system. This was a weird bug, whatever it was, and my body didn’t know what to do with it. If this peaceful, easy breathing lasts, especially through a good workout, I’ll call this a plausible treatment (for MYSELF) for respiratory infections.

I won’t call it a plausible treatment for you, Dear Reader. You should never take medical advice from a hillbilly mommy blogger, OK? You take your life into your own hands when you do that.

Want to discuss? Join me on either MeWe or Social Galactic.

Update: After a couple of days of not wheezing, my wheeze did come back, but it never got as bad as before. I also started to feel really, really good (except for the breathing), able to fully keep up with my family’s needs for the first time in weeks. The rest of the family also came down with the same symptoms, but recovered very quickly. We tested negative for Covid-19. I think it was probably just a run-of-the-mill flu. Anyhow, I finally tapped out and called the PA I go to, whereupon she told me to just tough it out like I’ve been doing, it’s just taking me a while to recover. I do think the silver helped a lot, but it wasn’t quite a magic bullet as I’d hoped. Perhaps there was some infection set up, and the treatment did help, or perhaps it was coincidental that I started to feel so much better so quickly. Either way, I’m keeping this in mind as a possible treatment for future illnesses. It certainly didn’t hurt.