me and vicks
Jan. 13, 2009 — Misuse of Vicks VapoRub may have landed an 18-month-old girl in the hospital, Wake Forest University researchers suggest.
The previously healthy girl had an upper respiratory infection, for which her grandparents treated her with a dab of Vicks VapoRub under the nose. In about half an hour, the child began to struggle for breath, and she was taken to the emergency room.
Bruce K. Rubin, MD, professor of pediatrics at Wake Forest’s Brenner Children’s Hospital, suggests the grandparents’ misuse of Vicks VapoRub may very well have caused the girl’s respiratory distress.
Having been raised by a very careful (and very protective) family, I’m proud to say that I love them. They tried their very best (sometimes a little too hard) to make my life something they wished they had back in their day. It’s also to be noted that they’re quite traditional and pretty superstitious.
They take their little habits from all sorts of cultures so I’m not really sure which is which. During the new year, they’d put round stuff near the door and have a basket of fruits on the dining table. They also made me and my siblings jump on Easter and New Year’s Eve. I believe that we’ve also had some other traditional Filipino artifacts around the house.
One part of my childhood was the oh-so-overused Vicks VapoRub. I clearly recall my grandmother rubbing the strongly scented rub on my back, on my chest, and even lined up the inside of my nose. I always found this annoying but it cleared up my nostril faster than my nose could run.
After seeing the article above, I couldn’t help but laugh.
Abanses called Rubin, a lung specialist. Rubin had never heard of Vicks VapoRub causing such a problem, but he knew the product was labeled for use only in children older than 2 years — and that the product should never be applied to the nostrils.
Was my grandmother wrong? I wonder who else went through the same kind of childhood I did. If the stuff was never meant to be applied to the nostrils, who the hell thought of putting the mint puddy in there?! It never occured to me that what they did could be wrong. I always believed that what they did was just another natural thing.
I start to think now that maybe there were some other things in my childhood done wrong. Perhaps all that mint messed me up somewhere along the way. Only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure, I’m not putting Vicks up my kids nose should I ever have one.
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