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fasting while sick
Wednesday I caught the beginnings of the crud that's been going around and started taking Sudafed aggressively to kill it before Yom Kippur, because fasting with a cold would suck. That didn't work, alas. Thursday night/Friday morning I noticed the first of two second-order effects: near as I can tell, the Sudafed -- whose job, after all, is to "make the emissions less bad" -- was having a dehydrating effect. So I stopped that before it could do more damage. The other effect was that the cold was sapping my appetite, when I should have had a large lunch and good-sized dinner on Friday.
It actually wasn't as bad as I had feared. I did make one concession: on Friday I bought a bottle of "throat spray" to deal with the soreness (or at least numb it away), and I took that to shul with me. I reasoned that while this might technically be in the same category as applying lotions, it's not food or drink and it's medicinal, so it was ok. (You spit it out after gargling with it. I would have taken pills if I'd had anything that I knew to work and be non-dehydrating. I wasn't going to experiment.) Beyond that, I took tissues, tried for aisle seats in case I had to run out, and did my best to minimize contact with other people.
Friday at Kol Nidre I was sweating like mad. I know that our HVAC has unintended climate zones and I was sitting on a supplementary chair in a place in the sanctuary not normally used for seating, so I figured I was just in a bad place. It happened again this morning (in a regular sanctuary seat not known to be bad for heat), and only then did it occur to me that perhaps I had a fever. Well, either the fever broke or the AC kicked in at the beginning of the torah service, and I was fine after that. The sniffling was not bad for the rest of the day and my voice is getting less froggy-sounding. Let's hope I've seen the worst of this.
As for the fast, I found that by about hour 19 I had stopped caring. I expected to be desperate for water by then because of the cold (and wouldn't have been too surprised if my rabbi had ordered me to the drinking fountain). But it wasn't an issue. Yay.
It actually wasn't as bad as I had feared. I did make one concession: on Friday I bought a bottle of "throat spray" to deal with the soreness (or at least numb it away), and I took that to shul with me. I reasoned that while this might technically be in the same category as applying lotions, it's not food or drink and it's medicinal, so it was ok. (You spit it out after gargling with it. I would have taken pills if I'd had anything that I knew to work and be non-dehydrating. I wasn't going to experiment.) Beyond that, I took tissues, tried for aisle seats in case I had to run out, and did my best to minimize contact with other people.
Friday at Kol Nidre I was sweating like mad. I know that our HVAC has unintended climate zones and I was sitting on a supplementary chair in a place in the sanctuary not normally used for seating, so I figured I was just in a bad place. It happened again this morning (in a regular sanctuary seat not known to be bad for heat), and only then did it occur to me that perhaps I had a fever. Well, either the fever broke or the AC kicked in at the beginning of the torah service, and I was fine after that. The sniffling was not bad for the rest of the day and my voice is getting less froggy-sounding. Let's hope I've seen the worst of this.
As for the fast, I found that by about hour 19 I had stopped caring. I expected to be desperate for water by then because of the cold (and wouldn't have been too surprised if my rabbi had ordered me to the drinking fountain). But it wasn't an issue. Yay.
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(Lots of cold and allergy medicines are off limits to me, so I tend to just stick with the things my doctor approves of -- Sudafed for colds and Claritin for allergies. I guess it's been a while since I've read the tiny print listing what's actually in the stuff.)