Vodka Ultimate Flu Cure!

Alright, I’m back. Suffering from the flu which reminded me of when I lived in Lithuania for several years back in the mid-90’s. I was renting a room in the basement of a 3 story house in Vilnius with a Polish ‘mochutay’ who carried a Lithuanian passport and spoke Russian. Mochutay reminded me of the joke about the guy who was born in Poland, grew up in Lithuania, and now lives in Russia but never left his village.

Her sons had disappeared and were presumed dead during the mafia wars. From what I gathered, they were stealing western cars and driving them to Russia and never returned even though one of them left a wife and 2 sons who lived on the second floor of the house. Mochutay was making ends meet by making homemade vodka in the bathtub and selling it at all hours of the night through a window next to my bedroom.

I had returned to Lithuania with $500 left in my pocket from a Stafford grant I had taken to complete grad school. I used $520 to buy a one-way ticket and had $500 to get started with no plan and the hopes to find a English teaching job for $200 a month. Mochutay’s place was a godsend after renting a small one bedroom in the industrial part of Vilnius and living rough for the first month after my return. However, I had neither health insurance nor an organization providing benefits nor backup and the onset of a cough and low-grade fever had me feeling vulnerable and nervous.

“Alex, Alex what is wrong with you?” Mochutay asked in what little inflected Lithuanian she had picked up after living in the country for 60+ years. “You have grepe?” “da” I answered understanding what she was asking thanks to Lithuanian suffixes which tacked on the letter ‘as’ onto words making the Lithuanian equivalent ‘grepas’. I could feel the concern and wondered if growing up during the Soviet times made her overly cautious about the grepe. I was reminded of a married Peace Corps Volunteer couple who lived in Central America and were somewhat amused and frustrated over their host mother’s concern over their cold and flu’s only to find out she passed away the following winter from the same type illness. They had written an article provided to volunteers and was an oft used case study on culture.

Mochutay came in to my room unannounced as typical and coo’ed “vot, vot, Alex” and motioned for me to sit up. She had brought a plastic bag into the room which reeked heavily of vodka and brought out a strip of cheesecloth. She poured some of her homemade vodka into a bowl and soaked the cheesecloth which then expertly wrapped around my neck. Then she took some plastic strip, presumably from one of her grocery bags, and wrapped that over the cheesecloth and finished it off with a heavy scarf she had knitted. She poured a large shot of the vodka into a shot glass and added pepper and a small green chile from her garden and motioned for me to drink since I didn’t speak proper Russian at that time. I drank the shot and it was the foulest tasting concoction which burned all the way down into my stomach. I was wondering if I was going to wretch when the slow burning sensation began around my neck which cresendo’ed into a major heat wave with sweat pouring off my face. She pushed me down onto the sofa bed I was sleeping on and threw some heavy blankets over me. I closed my eyes and was out for the evening.

I remember waking up in the morning and feeling…well….cured. No sore throat, no cough, my overall flu symptoms had simply vanished….how can this be? I had read through David Warner’s ‘Where there is no Doctor’ book but nothing about old school Soviet style flu treatment. I often smirk when I look at all the products on the shelves of American grocery stores for curing this or that symptom and think back to Mochutay’s methods and think she knows something that no chemist at Proctor and Gamble will ever learn. Vodka cures just about anything.