When we had kids in elementary school, there was almost always someone in our house in some stage of illness. That is becoming sick, being sick, or getting better. And it made perfect sense. When you’d drop your kids off at school and see the hundreds of other kids, several of which would be delivered with mucus-plugged noses and what-not, you only marveled that there was anyone in this collective who wasn’t sick.
Then, one day, Marty installed a humidifier in each of our home’s bedrooms. I was appalled. For someone who grew up in the humidity-free climate of Colorado, the notion of ADDING humidity to a climate already dripping with moisture seemed foolhardy. She explained that in the winter, the humidity went down and was not in the 140% range as it is the rest of the year. Great! Why aren’t we celebrating that instead of manufacturing more of it? Here’s what she said:
When you live in a humid climate, and the humidity goes down, it dries you out, namely your sinuses. When healthy, your nasal passages resemble the inside of your cheek and are moist and slick. When there’s not enough humidity, these passages dry out and become more like chapped lips, cracks and all. The problem is when you breathe in some bad microbes. For healthy and working sinuses, that speck of evil will land on the gelatinous surface and, in time, get sneezed or blown back out. But if your sinuses are dry, then the evil bit goes up your nose and lands directly on your dried-out skin, likely getting stuck in one of the cracks. This means instead of getting blown out, it will stick around and, in time, enter your bloodstream, and then it's game over.
I found her explanation compelling. But what was even more compelling were the results. After installing the humidifiers in our home, illnesses in our family all but disappeared, and having a sick person was no longer the norm; it was a surprising outlier. Consider me and my delightfully gelatinous nasal passages a zealous convert.
