Gravity and Colds

I have never been as mesmerised at a bodily occurrence as I was with the banging sensation of one's elbow until now, mid-way through a terrible cold. 

For two nights I was unable to lay down simply because my head was clogged with gallons of mucus and it just felt as though I was drowning when I lay horizontally, not to mention my blocked nose. Now that I am four days into my cold though, I have had only one blocked nostril at a time when I lay down, so now I sleep in my bed again and not on the uncomfortable thing that is our new sofa, which is convenient seeing as though the heater in my bedroom knows its bounds, unlike the heater in the lounge area which loves to watch the world burn. But the topic of heaters is not why I am writing today. 

I am writing today about the odd occurrence that happens while one is sick and laying down. To achieve what I am about to explain, one must have only one of their nostrils blocked. They then must choose a side to lay down on, preferably the side of the blocked nostril so as to allow a sufficient amount of air to flow through the former, and one must lay there in that position for about ten minutes, or until one feels the difference between the two halves of their faces. When that is the case, one must then fulfil the experiment and turn their bodies to the other side, the empty nostril, and that is when something strange happens. 

That gallon of mucus then, losing its hard texture, slithers down one nostril to the next, glides down the canals of your sinus on to the next canal. And there it sits just like it sat in the latter nostril, and it slowly begins to harden again. Overnight, despite however many times you move and despite how hardened your mucus becomes, if you turn in your sleep, the mucus will shift. It is the most bizarre feeling, feeling as though somebody has screwed your face open and is pouring gravy in your facial canals. This is even stranger now considering I have not caught a cold in two years time.  This all feels new to me. 

And as strange as this sounds, I will savour this mucus moment. I have no sense of taste nor a sense of smell nor any sense in my head, on that matter, for wanting this to last longer simply just to revel in the strange feeling it brings. 

Mandatory Meandering

Moving, shifting, ever changing through this journey of life, acquiring scar tissue and bruises and happiness and sadness, all sides of the dodecahedron looking shape we call life, twelve faces for each month of each year that we exist.

What motivates us? What pushes us out of our comfort zones and into places we feared to ever enter? What cradles us in moments of mental agony, when we feel that continuing to breathe cannot be possible? Why is it that most of us push on to an eventual demise, sometimes forgetting that it exists, that life will cease to be at any given time? Ernest Hemingway, my literary lover, said that "it is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end". We all are journeying to our ends, but are we taking the journey itself for granted?

It is difficult during moments of any sort of pain to see any light. The window to one's soul during these moments have their blinds shut tight, so tight that not even the tiniest of sun rays can enter to brighten up their days. In this instance one can fail to see the beauty in the world, one fails to remember their part in the world and the reason for the continuation of their journey. One eventually pulls through, but most of the time one does not. One might then get caught in a vicious cycle of self-hatred, of self-mutilation both in the physical and mental sense, and they may fall short of ever being able to reach the blind's drawstrings.

But we are mandatory. Each one of us. We each teach one another though most of us loathe the idea of school and teachers. We each teach each others lessons though most of us set bad examples. Jeffrey Dahmer taught me not to drug men and bring them back home to my apartment and eat them. Alan Grant taught me never to tour a park populated by live dinosaurs. Carl Denham taught me never to set sail towards Skull Island and on the off chance that I do, to never capture King Kong and bring him back to my hometown. Pinocchio taught me never to want to become a politician in the event of having an extended nose with larger nostrils during the flu season. Every day I am taught something on Tumblr, whether it is to love my body, to hate those who exploit and abuse animals, and to feed bees that appear to be dying sweet water to rejuvenate them. Tumblr also teaches me not to use it around others in the event that a pornographic gif pops up and dances on my phone screen beyond my control, but that is beside the point.

The point is that just like atoms, just like the molecules that make us up, we make up one another. We are crucial to the existence of others, which is why most of us require relationships to thrive, not romantic relationships necessarily. But everyone has someone, even that homeless man down the road who feeds pigeons his scraps even though he needs them to survive himself. The ocean will never feel fulfilled unless it touches daily the sand and fondles its many shells and bathes with its human visitors. The air cannot itself breathe unless it blows through the trees and tickles its many leaves, and it laughs with them and blows off through the branches of many other trees.

We are all interconnected, and though  people discriminate against the internet for taking away our lives, we should rejoice it for allowing us to meander mandatorily in a free manner, and to a larger audience.

Getting Treated by a Sick Doctor

The irony in it all simply amuses me, though I am more in fear than in excitement, for it appears that every time I decide to finally go to the doctor's clinic for a reason other than cold or flu symptoms, I seem to be placed in a situation that makes me prone to acquire it.

Like today, for example. For months I have been hesitant to go and get a rash underneath my chest area checked, and for months I postponed it until it got worse. Then I had a boil on my leg that would not heal, and then it was time for me to finally go get checked however I had to postpone again due to my university assuming that because I do not party I have no life thus it tied an imaginary leash to my neck attached to a collar with the initials 'VU' on it, and it tugged me away, until today when my mother decided to intercept my postponing and book an appointment herself without my consent, an appointment which I found out about an hour before it happened, from a note left on my computer:

Oh, I do appreciate my mother, her little ways which sometimes annoy me and her hilarious spelling errors, particularly how she spelt the word 'pimple' even after being informed twice by my sister about how to spell it. On another card which I had quarantined by throwing away after the doctor's visit, she had written a list of what I should ask the doctor, as though she knew I would not want to ask about anything except for my strange rash because I do not like staying for long in an area where sick people enjoy visiting, unless  myself am sick, and sick as in infected with the flu.

"Fungus," my doctor said, coughing violently in her hand before reaching for a note, writing down what over-the-counter cream would kill it, then handing me the note with that same hand. "What else does it say on that list?" she asked, smiling, because she caught me out. Yes, I had tried my best to hide the list after I realised my doctor had the flu, so as to not stay long enough around her in a room with no ventilation. My sister kept nudging my knee to indicate she's sick! You owe me! If I get sick, you die! I dared not look at her in case she would have killed me there and then.

So I gave up, and told her the other things on the list: the need for two new prescriptions, both of which she coughed on and handed to me, my strange boil which the poked without washing her hands from coughing, and she decided to test my sugar levels, again fondling my blood as though it were play-doh. I cringed every time. It appears that it is my bad luck that brings me these occurrences. 

I got home and I sprayed myself and my sister with Glen20. I then proceeded to wash my hands and face with my Dettol Antibacterial soap, and complained for the remainder of the day, both verbally and mentally. Just my luck. I visited a doctor who was sick herself, without being sick myself. Terrible. It is the one very reason as to why I choose to avoid visiting the doctor for these things. "Oh, you're not sick? Let us help you with that!"

I am going to shower very soon. I am still in the process of quarantining my body so as to not get sick for the next week. I need to attend my teaching rounds, otherwise I would have to make up the days I lose and that means losing days of rest. And to think I am fearing getting sick from going to the doctor's clinic!