I grew up without a computer.  The only way to get information on any subject was from books, and thankfully, my family had thousands of tomes on all subjects spanning the walls of the apartment.  If it was a word or an event date that I was unsure about, there were the few dozen burgundy coloured monsters, comprising the encyclopedia.  If you could put things in alphabetical order, you could find anything in those.  For all other inquiries, I could turn to various quotations from poetry and fiction, and, as a last resort, to my parents, who, I was convinced, were the smartest people in the world.  At times, watching the way my kids learn, makes me wonder what I would turn out like if instead of digging through the many pages of books I had Google, and Ask, and WebMD...this last one is the subject of this little bit of self-expression.

The last few days here were the coldest we've had in over a decade, and I don't respond well to temperature changes.  Throw some stress into the equation, and waking up with 3 humongous clusters of cold sores on my lips was almost to be expected.  Yes, I know it's herpes of sorts.  I also know it's incurable, once you get these pests, they'll keep coming back.  I also know that they tend to pop up at the most inopportune moment, such as a day or two before some public appearance (a humane society fundraiser tomorrow).  Looking very much as if I just had a botched lip injection procedure, and feeling icky, I resorted to my normal routine - a small and over-priced tube of Abreva.  The next morning my lips were even more swollen than before, only now I was also sporting a very prominent second chin - my glands, the ones I could find were swollen as well.  Hubby, concerned, went off to the pharmacy in search of a thermometer and advice, and I hit the Internet.

WebMD seemed like the most natural choice, so I went in, and answered honestly the check your own symptoms questions, and hit Continue button.  The window that popped up told me that I needed to call 911 immediately.  Spending a day at the hospital was not was I was hoping for, so I proceeded to Google "Cold Sores".  After reading a few articles on this pesky phenomenon, I learned that your lymph nodes can, indeed, swell, and it is normal.  So I no longer had to worry about going to the ER.  Now all I had to do was find a way of getting rid of these things in two days.

I read fast, very fast.  I browsed the first 10 or so pages of results, without finding anything that sounded legit or doable on short notice, and, indeed, most of those tried to sell me a magic recipe for Only $49.00.  But then, I hit a gold mine of advice on an unpretentious site, that appears to be a student project where people from around the world contribute home remedies that have worked for them.  Click here for the site.

There are probably over a 1000 entries under cold sores on the site.  Some of them required rather drastic measures involving needles and other things that I could never bring myself to use.  Others mentioned ingredients I had never heard of before. 

One ingredient that seemed to be recommended more than any of the others was acetone free nail polish remover.  I am a very skeptical person.  I am also not vain enough to risk death over looking ok for an evening, but towards the end of the day the pain alone was going to drive me insane, if I didn't do something.  Putting nail polish remover on my sore lips didn't sound logical, or make any sense, medically speaking, but so many people wrote fab testimonials to the miracle cure for cold sores, that desperation won over reason.  I put nail polish remover on my lips with q-tips over and over again, because a bunch of people who may or may not exist, scattered throughout the world, told me via a string of zeros and ones that it works, and I believed them.

Yes, it made me question my sanity... The good news - it didn't kill me, and it certainly seems to have sped up what would ordinarily be a 10 -day ordeal.  I might even be my normal self by tomorrow, thanks to the bizarre advice.  The larger question though remains: to what extent do we trust the information we find on the net, and do our circumstances at the moment of searching for that info overshadow our ability to be selective? 

Would you try a remedy found online, no matter how bizarre sounding, if you were desperate enough? 

Something to ponder, while I go an apply another layer of stuff to my lips...