nerd’s eye view

Recycled: Pack him in onions and other remedies

December 14, 2006 – 8:48 am | by nerd's eye view

In spite of the arrival of Mr. Nerd’s Eye View, things are quite pedestrian around the West Coast Corporate Headquarters lately. I have a day job and while a regular paycheck is a delight – I get paid WEEKLY! How crazy is that?!?! – it means that mostly, I’m sitting here at the Nerd’s Eye View command center reordering words. From time to time I ask someone to explain what their words mean, and then, I reorder them again. Mundane, no?

So again, I fill my blogging dedicated time slot with seasonal recycled material – this time from January, 2003. Enjoy.

I spent most of the Christmas holidays in bed. I had a nasty cold. The worst part of it was not missing the holiday festivities, though I was pretty bummed out by that. The worst part was the feeling that I had a baseball lodged in my head, somewhere between my tonsils and my Adam’s apple. I’ll spare you the gory details about what the back of my throat looked like.

This went on for about five days. I missed yet another family dinner. Apparently those present at the New Year’s Eve meal took this time to discuss my treatment, as the husband came home with a solution to all my problems. It was a package of topfen (an Austrian hybrid that’s somewhere between ricotta and cottage cheese) and some bandages. “You’re going to get a topfenwickel,” he said.

Now, I thought he said ‘topfenweckerl’, which is one of my favorite bread products, a roll that’s made with topfen as a main ingredient. I love those things. They’re sort of nutty and have a lot of seeds stuck all over the outside. They’re great toasted with butter and cheese on them. I wasn’t very hungry but a topfenweckerl seemed okay. I could eat one, I guess.

He sent me to bed. He stood at the head of the bed and started spreading the cheese on the bandages.

“What the hell are you doing? I can’t eat that!”
“You’re not supposed to eat it. I’m going to wrap you up in it and you’re going to lie here for an hour. It’s to suck out the infection.”
“Is this some kind of a joke? Did you sit around at dinner making up jokes to play on the foreigner?”

‘Wickel’ was the word of the day. It means bandage and it’s no joke. The husband applied the cheese-topped bandages, cheese side down, to my embattled throat. Then he threw on a bunch of extra blankets and left me there for an hour. Or two. Or more. It seemed like an eternity. As much as I like topfen, I prefer it in my bread roll or my strudel. It’s not as appetizing when it’s applied to your skin with the requirement that you lie still for an hour, stinking of cheese.

A cold, they say, goes away in seven days if you do something about it, and a week if you don’t. By the time day seven arrived, I was feeling a lot better and was up and about again. I can neither confirm nor deny the effectiveness of the topfenwickel. I can, however, attest to fondness of the locals for wacky, homespun treatments.

For Christmas, my mother-in-law bought me a month at the local fitness club. This place is, most of the time, a henhouse. It’s full of chatty, sixty-ish ladies who seem to find my accent hilarious. They’re really nice; please don’t think I’m making fun of them when I say that they remind me an awful lot of that scene in Chicken Run when Rocky the Rooster is running the girls through fitness training. The guy that runs the place, Adi, is a former body-building champion with a certain Sigfried and Roy quality about him. He stands up front leading the ladies in calisthenics, joking with the girls while they chatter on and wave their free weights around, all while asking me things like “How do you say, “that guy Adi is a total joker” in English?”

For the last week or so, the husband has been laid up with a variant of my Christmas cold. Two days ago, he developed a nasty cough. I saw his mom at the gym yesterday and she asked me how he was doing. She ran out to buy some herbal tea for me to take home and brought it back to me while I was upstairs in the weight room. The ladies were running through their paces, with Adi in the lead. Naturally, they asked what was up and I stumbled through explaining that the husband was at home with a nasty cough.

“You have to pack him in onions,” Adi said, and the ladies clucked in agreement.
“Any special KIND of onion?” I asked. I pride myself on having just enough German to be a smart ass.
“No, no, any kind will do,” he said, ignoring my tone. “Slice them up, lay them out on his chest, wrap him in towels, and put him in bed.”
”Yes, yes,” agreed the ladies in the background. “And pack him in lots of extra blankets,” they clucked.“Right. Okay then. Onions.” I shook my head. “Okay.”

I finished up my weight circuit and wished the ladies and Adi a good day. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Onions. And NO lovin’. You can stroke his hair and say ‘poor baby’ but that’s it.”

“Lots of blankets!” the ladies shouted after me, as I headed down the stairs.

I came home and told the husband about this. He seemed unsurprised but declined to let me pack him in onions. He told me that there are lots of these home remedies and everyone uses them. They’re better, everyone thinks, and cheaper, than the chemical solutions provided by a visit to the doctor. He told me that for fever, you’re supposed to wrap the hand and feet of the afflicted in vinegar soaked towels. For diarrhea? Eat dried blueberries. Headache? Chamomile tea. And sage leaves for an irritated throat.

Maybe the sheer annoyance of being sent to bed with something smelly applied to your body is enough to get you over whatever is bothering you. I can’t say. I do know I’m suffering no ill side effects from being wrapped in cheese and that the smell of onions all over your sweetheart just about guarantees there will be no lovin’.

I did go to the doctor here last winter when I’d developed a nasty sinus infection. He sent me away with a bunch of prescriptions but no grocery list. I recovered in about a week. I remain unsure about which approach would have provided the better solution.

[tags]home remedies, Austria[/tags]