Teachable Moment

Boo, the second oldest girl child had her wisdom teeth yanked this past Monday. Three came out relatively ( I use that word loooosely) easy. The bottom right had to be split.
After the Novocaine wore off, the true pain set in.  The pain killers she was prescribed really haven't seemed to help all that much.
Over the past couple of days, she's cycled through periods where she was feeling rather perky, and then a little while later felt like hammered shit.
As it turns out, she's been cycling in and out of a fairly significant fever over the past two days.  Her body is working overtime on scant nutrition to heal the hurt. At first, I was thinking she had a secondary issue going on, flu, sinus infection, something like that. Her prescription pain meds, lame as they were, have run out, so we've switched to over the counter pain reducers. Her lymph glands are no where to be found, so secondary infection is not a concern. My personal favorite of over the counter pain meds is Doan's backache pills. Nucular, (Nuclear for those that don't speak George W.) aspirin.  Second favorite is Alieve.
Tonight, working with my daughter to break her fever got me to thinking.  Somehow, I know several methods to break a fever when the Tylenol or aspirin is not doing the trick fast enough. I don't recall my mother ever talking to me about this at all. I'm sure I've had several of them used to break my own fever when I was a child.  The thing that strikes me though is that somehow I remember them.
So, as I'm working on bring down my 22 year old  daughter's fever this evening, I was talking to her about what I was doing and why, imparting home brew remedies much older than myself.
We're not talking snake root tea here. Cold wash cloths, sipping ice water to bring down the core body temp, shallow luke warm baths wiping the skin with a washcloth. Things she could do when the day comes that she has her own little bundles of mayhem joy.
 I also imparted the Dad Field Manual temperature taking method. Hot forehead, condition yellow. Hot belly also, condition Red, your are running a fever.
In my upbringing, nobody ever thought to share a bit of this homegrown tech with me. Maybe it's one of those things that the womenfolk used to pass down from one generation to another. I apparently managed to pick it up by osmosis.
Given that the second oldest woman child was feverish, it appeared the perfect time to impart what I was indirectly taught... directly.
No lessons stick better than those learned by burn.
Her fever has broken. She has some unusual psychosomatic sensations going on, which I suspect are a side effect of the highly ineffective prescription pain killers she's been taking over the past three days. Or, it might just be that she just needs some TLC.
Got that covered.