1 post tagged “blood”
i've decided that, since playing with vox and reading all my friends' day-in-the-life posts overwhelming reminds me of blogging circa 1999, back when me and you and everybody else that now banks off blogs did just that, only slightly after the term had been coined, back when awards for best weblog were still called "best online diary," back before dave winer thought he had invented the medium, back when writing a sentence that ran on this long was perfectly acceptable because we weren't going to be constrained by your editorial rules, man, why not replay a few classics? below is the one that cinched me the trophy for "best online diary" @ sxsw 2000.
note that back then i was still capitalizing. how 20th century.
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Everybody should have a tale for the New Year; something that happened to them that positively affected their life, some important resolution upheld, something desired gained. You know, something special and meaningful that couldn't have happened at any other time. So here's my story, which ain't any of those things, but which is totally gross and disgusting:
New Year's Eve, on the cusp (as they say) of 1997. My original plan for this particular holiday had me dancing in the streets of New Orleans with my then-girlfriend Colette, ringing in the new year while trying to duck the rain of bullets all the rednecks were firing off (God bless America!) Colette had gone ahead of me to New Orleans in order to do Christmas with her family (she's a local), and I was going to stop off in Houston to do something similar with my family before driving on to meet her in the French Quarter.
Friends, let me tell you: New Orleans really is a fun place to be when the ball drops. Or so I'm told. My trip, you see, was not to be. The morning of the day I was to get in my car and drive east -- December 28, 1996 -- I woke up with a small scratching at the back of my throat. By the time breakfast was over, that little itch was a roaring, throbbing pain. By noon my throat has completely clenched up, and swallowing had become a three-minute long, stunningly painful ordeal.
Most people would panic if this were happening to them, right? Well, I was panicking -- but perhaps not as much as most, because my dad also happens to be an extremely competent and compassionate family doc, well-loved by many, many families in Houston. Who usually manages to diagnose my problems over the telephone, quickly and easily, and then sets about sending over the proper meds from his cabinet o' magical prescription medication. Fixes me right up, usually. So despite the fact that I couldn't swallow, and that my mouth had gone into hyper-saliva production mode for just this reason (except that I of course couldn't swallow that saliva, so instead it was steadily streaming out the side of my lips), I had faith that he could repair the damage.
No, I didn't really start panicking until my dad informed me that he had, quote, "no idea" what was wrong with me -- although he had some suspicions --and he would call a few of his "specialist" doctor friends and see if they could figure out what was up. So there I was, half-crazy with fear, spit pouring out into a small dixie cup under the left side of my awkwardly tilted head, quietly wishing I would either recover, pass out, or die.
It gets worse before it gets better. Day two found me getting even sicker. Saliva was still pouring out at a rapid rate, but my body had also decided to add retching into the mix. Since I hadn't been able to swallow anything for the past day, there wasn't a lot in there to puke out; "Not a problem," says the body, "Let's overproduce some stomach bile, too, and see how that looks on the way out."
Green, is how it looks.
Man, if I thought it hurt to try and get things down my throat, that was nothing compared to how it felt when stuff started coming up. A very pure sort of pain, I must say. As if my throat were covered with thousands of tiny sores, each one singing in agony whenever it was touched by a foreign substance.
Which, it turned out, was exactly what I had. Late on day two we get the diagnosis: A particularly weird little disease, not terribly common in adults, known as "Herpangina." Nothing to do with herpes or angina, for the record. Rather, it worked something like this: You know how, when you get a cold sore in your mouth, the act of touching that cold sore -- with your tongue, with a stray piece of food, with somebody else's tongue -- makes you recoil with a sort of exquisite, close-to-the-brain type of pain? Now imagine that instead of in your mouth, that cold sore is on the lining of your throat, and that instead of one cold sore, you have several thousand, up and down the length of your esophagus. And that, my friends, is herpangina .
This diagnosis brought me nothing close to relief, though. My little cold sore army had become so irritated by this point -- we're approaching New Year's Eve, here -- that they had started bleeding profusely. This blood was running down my throat, into my stomach, mixing with the bile, setting my stomach off, and soaring back upwards! A particularly disturbing thing to see, there in the toilet I was hunched over: an odd, seasonally appropriate mixture of bodily fluids, with a little saliva thrown in for good measure. Happy holidays!
Of course, on its way up the blood-n-bile mix would reirritate the lesions, guaranteeing that this unfortunate cycle would repeat itself every 30 minutes or so without fail.
Gives new meaning to "Out with the old, in with the new," don't it?
New Year's Eve came and went, with me on the couch, watching Animal House on tv in between jaunts to the bathroom. Colette called to say she was having fun in New Orleans. I'm sure she was; we broke up 3 months later.
On New Year's Day, my dad was about ready to take me to the hospital for an IV drip so I wouldn't starve to death, when one of those specialist friends of his called with an idea. The idea was a drug commonly used for treating shingles, although I forget what the particular name of that particular drug was. It worked, though. By the end of the day -- in hours, actually -- the sores were gone, and I was all better.
The new year had arrived, but I didn't have much hope for it.
1997 did in fact prove to be awful. A relationship ended incredibly painfully, and I backed that up by making a bunch of those stupid life mistakes that, in retrospect, seem even stupider.
The point here is not just to disgust you, by the way -- that's just a side benefit. The point, folks, is this: take care of yourselves going into this new year, wouldja? Y2k or not, try and find somebody you care about and, you know, be with them. It might be a good idea to start the year off on the right foot. There's something to that notion.
