You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
My gigantic rotting pumpkin head.
My cranium is saturated with phlegm. It’s like soupy gelatin that has yet to coagulate. My body is suffocating in its own rancid juices. There’s a viscous broth filling my lungs, my nose, my sinuses, my eye sockets. It’s a gelatinous goo that you see in the ocean, floating aimlessly with low inertia and little brain activity.
My head is a swamp where snot Crawdads have come to replicate, fester, then ferment in my nose.
I’m so congested, I have to breathe through my open mouth. I am a mouth breathing miscreant, fighting to stay alive.
It’s as if I have snorted a dump truck load of Portuguese Man O War into my sinuses and they are stinging every neuron receptor attached to my brain.
Every breath I take is a reminder that I am breathing through a respiratory system that is clogged like a storm sewer after a flood.
My face is a water balloon attached to the business end of a New York City fire plug.
The epidermal layer around my nose is stretched to the breaking point. It’s a surfer plunging over the lip of the world’s tallest wave. Surely he will die, but that 3 second 85 foot plunge is spectacularly daring.
Inside my puffy, swollen pumpkin head, is a sea of coagulating fluids laden with bacteria.
If I don’t blow my nose, to reduce the pressure, there will be an explosion. My brain is a tea pot boiling savagely, angrily. If you weld the spout shut and don’t reduce the heat, there will be an unpleasant combustion of finality.
So what’ the big deal? Blow your nose?
Well after 3 weeks, it IS a big deal.
BLOW! WIPE! BLOW! WIPE! BLOW! WIPE!
My nose is a newborn’s ass with a rash. My entire face is a pricker bush of sensitivity that cannot be touched, wiped, or God forbid Honked.
So I am at this precipice of what now?
Do I blow my nose to relieve the pressure? If I do, I will have to touch my skin which is like applying gasoline to a sunburn.
Or, do I forgo the nose blowing and let the pressure build inside my misshapen skull?
Yes I am the poster child for Elephantids!
While I ponder the BLOW. WIPE. BLOW. WIPE. doomsday scenario with no beneficial outcome, I feel my eye balls begin to bulge. I look like a Bugs Bunny character whose toes have just been hit by a mallet.
My insides are like flood waters rising against the levy, pushing the barrier to the breaking point.
ACHEW.
And then there’s the sneezing.
BLOW. WIPE. SNEEZE.
It’s the holy trinity of sickness.
I envisage my skull exploding like a shot gun blast of snot. It’ll be directed by Sam Peckinpah in a slow motion massacre. The goo will cover the lens and ooze down the saloon doors.
Or perhaps my pumpkin head bursting off my shoulders will be like a scene from Alien where nobody can hear you blow your nose in space. Ridley Scott will raise the level of anxiety as my cheeks open and a mucous flavored alien rips out of my eye. Will it be sneering with fangs? Will the green glop be acidic and burn the floor of my house?
I’ve been sick for close to a month. It started as a sniffle and a nose blow here and there.
I thought it would go away with time and a few beers.
While the beers did help my over all constitution, they did very little to dry up my sinus cavities.
I took over the counter cold medicine with reckless abandon. Take 1 every 6 hours, started to mean take one whenever the hell you want. I was popping Dristan tablets like a toddler eating jelly beans at Easter.
Vic’s Nasal Spray worked a few times. But by week 3, the acrid aerosol stench of Mr. Clean and Pine Sol did little to dry me up.
I sprayed so much toxic medicine into my head, I had become immune. I was a snot zombie of congestion walking barefoot through a mucous stained Chernobyl.
I am now in full scale respiratory distress. You can only blow out the gunk or sniff it up so many times. And when you inhale your own fluids, where does it go? Back into your already swollen pumpkin head?
You can swallow it, but that is not only disgusting, it will make you gassy.
Today, I did something that many of you more sagacious souls would have done on day 3 of this Iliad like quest;
I called the doctor.
“We can see you at 1:15 pm,” the woman said.
“Is that the earliest?,” I chortled as if I could somehow bypass their busy schedule.
Don’t they realize I’m clinging to life, sucking the remaining oxygen from a pocket of air in an underwater cavern?
Don’t these doctors realize that my nasal congestion has become a full scale race riot with water cannons and CNN making up facts.
“I have a dream,” MLK would shout if he heard my heinous discharge one more time.
HONK! CHORTLE! SNIFF! SWALLOW!
“We’ll see you at 1:15,” the disgusted receptionist says hanging up rapidly.
And there it is. I am a pumpkin headed monster, blowing my nose and scaring children. My honk is startling and loud like a nasal light house warning wayward ships at sea to stay away from the rocks.
I can only hope that somewhere in that doctor’s office there is a one shot cures all for what I got.
If not, I will surely die from this.
My epitaph will read:
Here lies pumpkin head. Swollen, disgusting. Killed by his own mucous demons.
Life’s Crazy