RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WANTED: SOME DECENT FOODSTUFF TO CURE THE CRUD

There is a heavy fog this morning. Not outside. Inside your head. The wet, stuffed-cotton feeling is the result of antibiotics, decongestants and cough syrup laced with codeine. Welcome to the crud, 1995 style.

Hundreds of you have experienced the crud already. Here's a piece of advice for the rest of you: Go immediately to some god-forsaken city in some Third World country and take a deep drink from the first open sewer you come to. Whatever you get won't be half as bad as the crud.

This may be the soundest health advice you get all year.

Some of you were sensible and took flu shots last fall. Shots have never been your best friend, so you decided, for the umpteenth time, to take your chances. So this is how diehard gamblers feel when they lose a big pot.

Speaking of pots (fear not, gentle reader, this column won't stoop that low), the ceramic seat in your bathroom has become a welcome haven. "Drink lots of liquids," the doctor said. "Drink lots of liquids," your wife said. "Drink lots of liquids," your co-workers said. Just where in the heck do they think all these liquids are going to go?

In addition to being adrift in a sea of tapwater, you have no appetite. Of all the symptoms, this is how you know for sure if you are really sick. Eating comes naturally. Always has. You have never met a food you didn't like. Except for that one time your wife decided to put okra in tacos. That was a long time ago.

Your aversion to food extends to a hearty dislike for whatever it was that you ate the most of right before the crud struck. Has this ever happened to you? Many years ago your wife made a delicious salad of marinaded vegetables. You ate and ate and ate. And then you got the crud. Just before the crud hit this time, you bought some dried fruit mix that included large chunks of papaya. Now the very thought of a papaya makes your blood run cold.

What you worry about most -- there is plenty of time to worry, because sleep and the crud do not happen at the same time -- is that you will give the crud to someone else. That's how you got it. Half a dozen folks in the newsroom have been hacking and wheezing and gulping antibiotics for almost a month now. You fear there may be more victims.

Meanwhile, you have discovered daytime television. To be real truthful, the soap operas aren't what you remember from 20 or 30 years ago when you worked nights and got hooked on "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing." That really happened. Nowadays the soaps are full of sexy bedroom scenes. Sometimes they don't even bother with the bedroom. When you have the crud, watching other people with perfect bodies and hair that never musses isn't exactly a healing regimen.

You also have discovered how boring the O.J. Simpson trial is. Why the heck doesn't that judge start smacking some of those lawyers around and make them behave?

Sorry, that's the codeine talking.

When you were a boy, your mother had a special treat for you when you were ill and didn't want anything to eat. She would fix dry toast, hot tea sweetened with sugar and cooked rice with sugar.

The other day you were reading in a magazine where some tests had revealed healing qualities in those very foods. And chicken soup too.

Before manned spacecraft head off for Mars or some other planet, would it be too much to ask if scientists could find some food to make the crud go away?

Please let it be chocolate or butterscotch.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.