Season Four Kick Off: Holiday Wrap Up and Fighting the Flu

A new season begins with a promise: keep it personal, practical, and rooted in community. We lay out the plan for the months ahead, including a monthly feature with our friend Kara as she navigates life with her son Nolan, who has KCNQ2. Treatment exists, but access is blocked by costs and coverage gaps, so we’re committing space and energy to amplify their story and keep the donation link front and center. If you’re new here, this is where advocacy meets everyday life—honest, direct, and built for action. I encourage you to take a few moments and visit the non profit that Kara has built, every penny counts towards changing someone's life --https://give.rarevillage.org/campaign/733811/donate

From there we zoom out to the realities many families felt over the holidays. Sales were thin, budgets were tighter, and creative choices kept the season afloat—from Five Below finds to thoughtful, modest gifts. That financial picture sets the stage for a bigger conversation about health decisions, because money, stress, and time shape how families respond when the flu knocks on the door. We use our own household as a case study: two kids, flu A, and a careful approach to fever that prioritizes safety while recognizing the body’s natural defense.

We break down the two schools of thought on fever management. One side argues for suppression to limit strain; the other treats fever as a protective response that deserves room to work. We chose close monitoring, hydration, cooling measures, and nutrition over automatic fever reducers—and watched the illness resolve in two days for each child. Along the way, we talk through guardrails: age, temperature thresholds, risk factors, and when to intervene. We also share what helped: cold-pressed juice with kale, pineapple, and apple; pineapple skin and ginger tea with manuka honey and hibiscus; and steady fluids and rest for everyone exposed.

If you’re a parent weighing comfort against recovery speed, or an advocate looking to support families facing rare disease, you’ll find practical insights and a clear path to help. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with your fever philosophy—we’d love to learn how you navigate these choices.

Chapters

• 0:00 Season Four Kickoff
• 0:43 Spotlight On Kara And Nolan
• 2:33 Donation Commitment For 2026
• 3:33 Holiday Economy Reality Check
• 5:19 Flu Season And Fever Basics
• 7:10 Two Schools Of Thought On Fever
• 9:00 Letting Kids Ride Out The Fever
• 10:20 Flu A, Juicing, And Family Care
• 12:10 Takeaways, Safety, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Still Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. Welcome to season four. Yes, that's right. Still Roses Podcast has been around for four seasons now. Um, with the first episode launching, I believe, in 2022. So very, very proud of this four-season set that is happening. Um, it's been quite the journey. For those of you who have been with me since the beginning, you can hear the difference in the episodes. Um, so let's dive right in. I took my little break over the holidays, and as usual, I always like to kind of refresh, reset, see what I want to focus on, and how we're gonna pivot for the following season. This year, we are leaning more into individual episodes. You will find some guest episodes happening here and there. Specifically, a friend of mine is going to be featured monthly on the podcast to share her story and her experience with a child with rare disease. If you want to catch some prel some of the initial episodes with her, her name is Kara. It was the last two episodes in December that aired was the initial story for Kara's story with her son Nolan. Nolan has a rare, very rare disease, KCNQ2. Um, and unfortunately, it has impacted his whole quality of life. As of now, uh, treatment is available for him. However, financially, it is very much out of reach. And this is one of those scenarios that is not covered by health insurance. So Kara's going to be coming on to share her monthly her story monthly. I am working with her as well as many others who want to help to try to generate donations and funds. Um, so for every episode in 2026, you are going to see the link at the bottom of the episode where you're able to donate funds to help support Kara's family to maybe get the treatment for Nolan that he needs. If this treatment doesn't come, I get emotional every time I talk about this. If this treatment doesn't come, this could mean a downfall, is the best way I can say it. And I think you all understand what I'm saying. So it's incredibly important. Every day that Nolan takes a breath is a miracle. I've personally met him. The light generating from this young person, this little seven-year-old, is phenomenal. So help me help them. Let's help each other. This is one of those calls to action that I deeply, deeply care about. And I would love if even if you're only donating five dollars at this point, whatever we can do to help move things along is really what I'm I'm trying to help here. So on that note, um, moving right along, I hope everyone had a great holiday season. This holiday season, you know, usually I talk a lot about the sales and things that I was able to accomplish via like, you know, all the Black Friday sales. If you're listening in the United States, we have the, you know, or outside of the US, it's called Black Friday. So basically it's the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is another holiday we celebrate here. And usually there's all these really great sales, like phenomenal sales. However, this year didn't happen. So I found myself and many other people turning to alternative means of purchasing gifts for our kids, including stores like Five Below, because to be perfectly frank, people couldn't afford the prices that were in Walmart and, you know, Target and Amazon even. The sales just were not there. They were not hitting it. And as much as our leadership here in the US would love to say the economy is getting better, prices are lowering, it's happening, Americans are in good shape. We are in S H I T shape. That's where we're at. Um, and I'm speaking from the middle class household here. I am not speaking from the well-off. What they do is their business. I'm talking about regular everyday Americans just trying to get by. And then everybody else who's on minimum wage, Lord knows, I don't know how anyone's doing it these days. I really don't. So I hope things do take a turn for the better. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as I'm sure many, many others are as well. Holidays were good though. We did get the flu, which apparently was rampant in the US this year, but not horrible. Now, on that note of the flu, this is actually leading into something that I've talked about, or I kind of learned about like last year. And I feel like an idiot that I didn't know this sooner. Now, you know, when you're sick with something like the fever, or in general, when you're ill and you have not sick with the fever, but when you when you have an illness that induces a fever, the fever is your body burning the illness out of your system, right? So the hold on one second. Does fever burn? So the fever is, yes, when you have a fever, sorry, I wanted to Google that because I didn't want to say something that I wasn't researching. I like to fact-check myself even. When you have a fever, it's the warming up of your body's natural response to fight a virus. So think about it like a fire alarm that goes off when there's a sign of smoke. The fever starts low grade and then it goes higher and higher when it's working really hard to burn out the virus. Now, when my kids were really little, fever came, Tylenol. Now we all know the bit, we all know the detriment of using Tylenol at this point. So I kick myself every single day for turning to Tylenol. My kids are older now, and when they were little, I never let them suffer with a fever. Always gave them medicine. Didn't want to hear them suffer. I wanted them to be able to sleep. They'd be miserable for like a week or two with these effects, right? Because I was consistently giving them medicine to reduce the fever. Unknowingly, I was extending the illness because the school of thought is. Let me go back to my other source of information here. The school of thought is that if you take fever-reducing medicine, then that means you are disabling your body's response to the virus that is trying to burn out of its system, thus making the illness take longer to exit your body. I came out, came across this information last year when I was sick. And I either was sick or I was about to be sick. And I remember distinctly thinking to myself, okay, I'm not gonna take any medicine. I'm gonna just suffer and sweat it out for the night, and then hopefully I'll be okay. I think it might have been last year when my whole family got the stomach virus. That was a nightmare, right around Christmas, too. Anyway, so I came upon this information last year. So we've applied it a few times. Personally, I've applied it a couple of times. The kids, you know, they were still little when I figured this out. So I haven't really hadn't really put it to them. So this year, Christmas comes. It's the week of Christmas. One of my girls goes down with a fever. She's sick. So I'm monitoring her. I test her for flu and for COVID just to make sure that, you know, it's nothing major. Both came up negative. And so I know we're just burning through something. And even if it's the flu or COVID, you still have to burn through it. It is what it is. Unfortunately, this is where we're at. You can take, you can get your flu shot, you can get your COVID shot, you can get any kind of vaccine you want, but vaccines are not a cure and they are not a hundred percent barrier. Vaccines are meant to make sure your body has been exposed to the virus and thus already has some immunity to it. But it doesn't mean you're immune. It just means that when you get it, you won't get as sick. That's all it means. And it's somewhere, somewhere out there in the world, as soon as people leave their homes, this becomes confusing, a confusing concept. But that is the concept. So my daughter gets sick, and my immediate response was, let's hold out. So for the whole day, I'm just watching her low-grade fever. She's really droopy. She's just laying on the couch, she's not herself, she doesn't want to eat. She's telling me her stomach hurts. Yes, this all makes sense. So I go to her and I say, Listen, you have two chance, two options here. Now my daughter's eight. I should probably say that so you can understand how this might actually seem a little crazy to do to an eight-year-old, but my kids are we're very open with them. If you heard me talk about my parenting methods on other episodes, we're very open with the kids. We give them the straight, like we should shoot it straight. We do not sugarcoat, we give them the facts and they know it. So I go to my daughter and I say, listen, these are your options here. We can either give you medicine and it will make you feel better, but then you're gonna be sick for longer, or you're going to just gut it out and let them let the fever burn it out. And I explained what the fever was going to be doing. Um, and I do want to read from this before I give you what happened. So I did Google it to make sure I was giving you you guys the right information. So the National Library of Medicine, there is an article here: fever, suppress or let it ride. There are two basic fields of thought. Fever should be suppressed because its metabolic costs outweigh its potential physiological benefit in an already stressed host, or the fever is a protective adaptive response that should be allowed to run its course under most circumstances. Now, that is really the rub. You have to decide is it more beneficial to let it run or or you know, and is it is that safe? Or is it completely unsafe and we need to give medicine? When their kids are very little, you can't let it run. You cannot let their fever get past 101, really, because they're they could it couldn't do seizures, even in children now. My kids now, their fever hit 102. I watched it. I waited and I watched it. And if it went a little bit above, I was gonna give Tylenol. It was going to happen. It dropped. Each time it dropped, it would hit its peak and then it would come back down. I would give them water, cold compresses, have them take showers. I would keep them cool, but I let them ride it out. Those are the two schools of thought. You want to take this with you as a parent, you as an individual. What is safe to do? I am not a medical professional. I am just giving you my opinion as a mother. So I proposed to Genevieve or my daughter Genevieve. What do you want to do? And she looks me in the face and says, Mommy, I'm gonna try to gut this out. And I said, All right, honey, let's get you some fluids, let's get you water. You have to conheat drinking your cold water, make sure you're hydrated. We kept it going. She did not take Tylenol once during the time that she was sick. She was only sick for two days with the flu. Very proud that this is what happened. Her sister got sick the day after she started. That's a given. They share a room. I proposed the same options to her. She got it out. Not as tough as the other one, but she she did. She made it. Again, two days. They got had flu A, which we went and verified at the urgent care clinic. Flu A, two days they were done. Now, in addition to fluids in general, I also make cold press at home, nutrient dense. Our favorite flavor thus far is, and this was by design that I made sure I made extra the week that everybody was sick. It included kale, pineapple, and apples. If you look up the health benefits of those three combined, you will understand how significant that was to the healing of my twins. The other significance is myself, my husband, my mother, and my son. None of us were wearing masks. We were all exposed to flu A. I pressed the cold pressed juice on everybody. Everyone every single day was drinking two, three glasses of cold press. I was in the kitchen every day making bottles and bottles of cold pressed juice, making sure that everyone had that. And I was making immunity tea, making sure that I had the the um the skin of the pineapple, ginger, and I forget what the oh, manuka honey, threw everything into a pot uh with hibiscus as well. Threw everything into a pot, let that boil. We drank that all week. Not one other person got sick, just the twins. This to me was a miracle. This was huge. I was nervous about my mother getting sick. I was nervous about me getting sick. Everyone else getting sick doesn't make me as nervous. I can care for them. But if I get sick, that's a bad thing. Because while my husband is the head of this household, I am absolutely the commander of the ship. And so it can't, it can't operate without me. Can't happen. So the big thing here, the big takeaway is if it's possible and if it's safe to ride out an illness and let the fever burn through your system as it is meant to do naturally, that is what I'm always going to pick. You have to make the best decision for yourself and your family. I only started doing that recently. I never did it to my kids when they were very little. I would have never let them suffer like that, even if that meant their illness was longer. I wouldn't be able to do that. They're too small, not gonna happen. If you're very old, your fever is very high, if your immune system's already weak. There's a lot of factors in there that you have to take in consideration. Do your research, do your homework, see what's best for you. And that's the decision you're gonna want to go with. I hope you found this episode informative. Very excited to be back for season four and for generating more information for you guys. If you have specific topic requests, please send them over to me. You can reach me via email. I think there's a link in the description. You can reach me on Instagram and you can reach me, I think, on Facebook still, as well as LinkedIn, which LinkedIn is probably the best spot to go to if you really want to reach me directly. It's great being back with you all. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.