I'm tempted to add a "murphy" category to my weblog. Why? Because
he strikes so frequently. Take, for example, now. I'm giving two
back-to-back talks this afternoon at Y! Taiwan. There's nothing wrong
with that except for the fact that I have a runny nose from the
SARS cold I caught in either Japan or Korea.
Grr.
The good news is that we fly home tonight. The bad news is that it means spending 11 hours on a plane with a runny nose. But it'll be good to be back home anyway.
Posted by jzawodn at October 28, 2003 06:28 PM
The headlines tomorrow; "New SARS outbreak in the US!". Sorry, someone had to mention it :)
Well, if you can find any over there, I'll note that having a shnozz full of Zicam seems to keep me from killing tissue trees.
I'm from Toronto. Finding it hard to laugh. :|
I'm from Connecticut where we had the anthrax bit. Gotta keep that sense of humour going :)
Randy, I can keep the sense of humour going, but one or two anthrax scares is a touch different than 50 people in your city dying and 25,000 under quarantine. Heck, one of my mates had SARS.
There's a time to laugh, and I'm totally one for dark humour, I guess that this one struck a chord.
I guess it's the difference between laughing at and laughing with. I love laughing with friends about SARS, guess I'm just not at the place where I can stand someone poking fun at it yet.
I should probably lighten up ;)
I used Zicam for about a year and loved and praised the product for cutting the time cold symptoms stuck around. One day at the office people were complaining about something being cooked in the Microwave being stinky and I did not detect any odor. When I got home later that day, my wife was changing our granddaughter's diaper and commented "wheew, this little girl is stinky"; once again I did not detect any odor. After these incidents I went around and sniffed various items, deodorants, perfume, onions, etc., and could not detect any smell from any of them. Prior to this discovery my sense of smell was tremendous, I was able to smell a minute gas leak in a very large building. In addition to losing my sense of smell, tastes of many items, especially berry based products such as red wine and berry jam were extremely distorted. At the time, I did not relate my problems in any way to the use of Zicam. I went to my doctor for the problem and he sent me to an ENT doctor who could not find any reason for my loss of smell. A few weeks later, after discussing the problem with my daughter in San Francisco, she researched on the Internet loss of smell and found many articles on loss of smell after using Zicam. So far I cannot prove Zicam is the source of my problem but it is the only thing that makes sense. My life has changed drastically since losing my sense of smell, I can no longer smell morning coffee or bacon frying, the wonderful smell after a rain, my granddaughter's baby lotion and so on. There are now very few drinks that have a decent taste. As a man who always enjoyed good food and drink, a big part of living has been altered. As I said above, I cannot prove Zicam is the culprit but I tell friend and aquaintances about my problem and let them be the judge for their own use. Most of my friends knowning what my sense of smell had been no longer are willing to risk using Zicam. I also do not think it is worth the risk.
