education, Fitness, Health, Medicine, Uncategorized

The Blues

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Maybe not a breakfast topic, but what the heck!

Last Thursday I woke up in the wee hours and couldn’t get back to sleep. Even turning on my “go-to-sleep” movies didn’t help.  Then when I finally decided to just get up, I had a headache – an unusual occurrence for me.  I was scheduled to give blood later in the morning so spent a couple of minutes checking on Google if there was anything I could take for a headache before getting stuck.

Then I trudged into the bathroom and blew my nose. It was blue.  I’m not kidding.  And not just any blue, but aqua blue.  Bright aqua blue.  Disturbing to say the least.  Since I had the laptop all powered up, I headed back to my room and searched “blue ____ (fill in your favorite word)”.  I was not really expecting to find anything, but it’s the internet, so I should have known better.  Apparently there is a bacteria (Pseudomonas pyocyanea) that causes this blue output.  One of the other symptoms – headache! This infection doesn’t seem to be majorly life-threatening although a few websites did say if it went on for more than a day or so, you should definitely get to your doctor.  Great. So then I spent time trying to figure out if I should give blood if I might have this bacterial infection.  That I couldn’t find.

I was still struggling with whether I should cancel my trip to the blood mobile when I went downstairs. As I went to get Rhiannon’s morning pill on the kitchen counter, my eyes fell on the Ukrainian dye that I had stirred up the night before.  Purple and — wait for it — aqua.  The dyes are made up of really fine powder; I must have gotten some of it in the atmosphere and breathed it in.  Subsequent nose blowings confirmed the blue to be a one-time occurrence and not a continuing “infection”.  I felt like an idiot after spending at least an hour searching online.

Hypochondria isn’t an affliction that I usually count among my foibles, but after Thursday, I’m not so sure anymore.

Any embarrassing revelations to take the heat off of me?

40 thoughts on “The Blues”

    2. I did the same thing with a package of Twizzlers, cherry Twizzlers. I knew that losing that much blood could only mean I had an advanced cancer. One way to avoid this would be to eat sensibly (like never eat a whole package of Twizzlers in one sitting). Another response would be to not look at what’s in the toilet before flushing. The second option is the one I’m going with.

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  4. My first basset hound, the dear departed Norma, was the sort of hound who ate everything. She ate birthday candles, shoe insoles (though never the uppers), photos, 1.5 lbs of truffles (she lived, but the output was…messy), a tiny frog (probably meant to just lick it, but it was tiny, so down it went), and she nibbled on a pair of red undies. The last in that list, well, I forgot about her snack until the next morning. I was out with her in the yard (I was living somewhere with no fence so had to accompany her for her outdoor trips. It was just dawn, it was cold, and I am not a morning person. As she did her thing, my first thought was, “Oh ____ my dog is bleeding out of her backside.” Then I remembered what that actually was and I was mortified. I have never cleaned up after a dog so quickly. She was fine. I have not bought a multipack of undies with red in it since.

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    2. We used to keep our Crayons in a big red Folger’s coffee can. We had enough to fill the can . . . maybe 80 Crayons, maybe more. One day our St. Bernard, Bobo, ate the whole thing. For several days we had the prettiest dog poop in the Midwest.

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    3. Our first golden retriever, when he was a puppy, ate a pair of panty hose, which could have been serious except he then ate a bar of soap and threw the whole mess up. It makes you wonder how golden retrievers ever survived in the wild…

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  5. Rise and Reveal, Baboons,

    The “Blue Nose” has the aromatic equivalent of asparagus when pee-ing.

    I think it is significant that beets, that lovely and immoral (according to A. Bronson Alcott) vegetable, has come up two days in a row.

    When I was in the 8th grade, I went to a pre-football game party at Becky Pew’s house, where hot apple cider was served. It was the first time I ever encountered this wonderful stuff so I drank a lot of it. Too much of it. Our Junior HIgh Band was the half-time entertainment. While marching around on the field, the liquid results of all that apple cider manifested itself. Following the show, I slunk off the field, walked home with the mess in my pants and cleaned up. I sneaked my band uniform pants to the dry cleaners, paying for it out of my allowance. I never told a soul until this minute, 53 years after the event. 🤭🥴

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  6. Our first Welsh Terrier, Casey, loved to steal articles of clothing. One day she grabbed one of my bras and took it into the back yard and dragged it all over while we had guests. I remember chasing her to get it back. She thought it was great fun.

    Some friends of ours were embarrassed when their dog got loose and returned to their yard with a nicely cooked steak it had stolen from someone’s outdoor grill.

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    1. These confessions are making me giggle a lot. Yesterday at PT I was given 3 new strength-building exercises that are really hard for me. I am reading and giggling while I do these. It is a terrific distraction. Keep confessing!

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      1. Well, that didn’t work as I had planned. Let’s try this:

        The group is named “tenThing” and is from Norway. I saw them perform a couple of years ago in St. Paul in a concert sponsored by the Schubert Club.

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  8. *Warning* a lot more gross than blue snot or Crayola poop* But I kept it as un-graphic as possible.

    30+ years ago, I had lunch with an old HS/college friend whom I hadn’t seen in about 10 years. We went to lunch at the old Calhoun Club on the north shore of whatever they call that lake now (I can’t keep the Indian name in my head).

    I had chili. It was NOT prepared with the highest of sanitary standards. AKA, it was NOT germ/bacteria-free. Driving back to work took about 20 minutes. My insides started to revolt about halfway there. I would have preferred my eventual denouement to come from an upper-GI release. Easy to stop the car and barf on the side of the road.

    Unfortunately, it was a lower-GI issue. I sped as much as I dared, clenched as much as humanly possible, but was about 10 seconds short of getting to the bathroom in time. I managed to confine the damage to my underwear. The most embarrassing part would have been to take my suit trousers to the dry cleaners.

    Chris in Owatonna
    (Oh, the things we are enticed/guilted into saying among friends!)

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      2. When the name of the lake was being debated, some of the opposition came from businesses with “Calhoun” in their name. As if, when the lake name was restored, they couldn’t continue naming their business after a nineteenth century proponent of secession and slavery.

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  9. OMG, I needed this, this morning – LOL all the way through!

    I can’t think of anything that compares with these stories, so I’ll offer this short (1 min 19 sec.) Burl Ives song from my childhood: “The Goat”

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  12. I just finished watching a documentary film that may be of especial interest to those of you with Iowa roots. It’s called “Saving Brinton” and it’s fascinating.

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