Sometimes you find the answer in the strangest places.

I spent much of the month of January "down with the flu". It hit not too long after I had made my first resolution to post more on my blog, I got the cough, headache, fatigue and all the little aches and pains associated with the flu bug. This lasted about three weeks and then I had to deal with the "complications".

For the first five days of the flu I was told to treat my symptoms with Over The Counter medications. That, I did! Ibuprofen, cough medicine, mentholated rub. Lemons, honey, chicken soup, pudding, lots of ice cream (for medicinal purposes only). None of it worked. 

During that week of the fog of flu I thought about the days of the old Sears Catalog with its elixirs, tonics and nostrums. It is a well-known fact that these concoctions were loaded with today's illegal substances. Morphine, cocaine, heroin!  Seriously, they gave this stuff to babies who were teething. All I wanted was a few hours sleep. I am sure one of those old fashioned tonics would have solved that problem.

Eventually I dragged myself, half alive, to my doctor's office. He took pity on me and gave me a prescription -- something for the complications that would soon present themselves. It took several weeks of one step forward and two steps back, but I am finally back to normal.

This experience made me take a long, hard look at the way drugs have been dispensed in the last 200+ years and the effect they may have had on our ancestors. Many of us have a "working" relationship with our ancestors -- we kind of know our great, grand, and parents. We found out that they suffered from various health issues some of which contributed to their demise.

At the same time we know the crazy rumors and stories about grandma and grandpa. My husband and I both had grandparents who would "walk out the back door and fall down the hill."  Perhaps a look at an old Sears Catalog could explain this phenomenon that used to occur quite often in the hills of southern Ohio and Kentucky. Just saying!

Just goes to show that sometimes you find the answer in the strangest places.