Posts Tagged ‘cough’
Don’t Cough
We’ve all done it. Accidentally inhaling our own saliva. It seems to happen at the most inopportune times, doesn’t it? I was near the front, center rows at a funeral service when I choked the choke that triggers involuntary spasms of coughing. You know it’s going to be bad, so you give it a couple of quick, full coughs in a vain hope of dealing with it all at once.
It rarely works. Then comes the following cough urges that you assume can be ignored by sheer will, but which subsequently get forced out as groans or squeaks that are probably worse than if you just let the coughs out naturally.
My lungs tend toward asthmatic, so I am prone to a daily period of throat-clearing and am no stranger to a random urge to cough throughout an afternoon. It’s usually an unconscious habit, but not anymore.
In the midst of a global flu pandemic, coughing is met with suspicion. I have no idea if I will sense a difference between my usual handful of coughs in a day and an early symptom of being infected with the COVID-19 coronavirus, but now when I feel an urge to cough, I’m noticing the question comes to mind.
I’m also noticing a little more self-consciousness about my tendency to cough.
“Don’t cough,” I tell myself. You will scare the people around you into worrying you may be spreading THE virus.
You know how well that works. Go ahead and try to suppress the urge. There is an inverse correlation in that the more you try not to cough, the more intense the urge to cough becomes.
Maybe I’ll start practicing the art of announcing my morning body temperature reading with each cough. Kind of like the “Excuse me” courtesy often uttered after burps, hiccups, coughs, and farts.
[cough!] “97.4.”
That’ll reassure them.
I’m not sick.
Yet.
.
.
Unintended Souvenirs
Sure, it was cold when we got home from the Dominican Republic last weekend, but at least we didn’t walk into a bomb cyclone!
I heard someone referring to our extreme below-zero cold episode as evidence that global warming isn’t deserving of the hype. Sadly, the reality of the crazy cold and snow that just played out in the south, combined with the dramatic storm forming in the northeast, fulfills a common symptom of continually escalating extreme weather events that are ripple effects of the warming planet.
Hold onto your hats!
Were you wondering if Cyndie and I brought home souvenirs from our family vacation to the Dominican Republic? Why, of course, even if we didn’t intend to.
Actually, Cyndie may have picked up hers from an airport or the recycled air in the plane. Don’t forget your Emergen-C!
Her souvenir happens to be a wicked cold virus. I hope she doesn’t end up remembering this trip by how ferociously sick she got at the end of it, starting around the time of the flight home. By day-four, she lost her voice, her head and chest are so congested she sounds like an alien life-force when she coughs, and days of unrewardingly fitful sleep has become the primary coping mechanism.
Life on the ranch is on hold for a while. When momma is sick, nobody is having any fun.
My souvenir from the trip happens to be beach sand. Imagine that. The bottom of the bag I packed was a little grainy. It’s appropriate, though. One of my highlights for the week was being able to play soccer on the beach on two different days, and coming away with only minor injuries from the effort.
The jammed toes on my left foot still carry a little souvenir residual pain from the brave act of thwarting nephew Eric’s blast of a shot.
Overall, I’d give my performance on the challenging surface of sand a C+, judged in reference to the gap between what I meant to do and what actually transpired.
Thank you to Barry for providing photographic evidence that my kicking form was a little off on the beach.
Regardless, the fun quotient was high, and that was sufficient for me.
Now I am occupied with maintaining a quarantine between myself and Cyndie’s souvenir germs.
So far, so good with that agenda. I’ll let you know if my success continues beyond her eventual (hopefully, soon) return to good health.
.
.
Hazardous Conditions
Yesterday, while working outside for long hours in the spring wind, we exposed ourselves to enough tree pollen to cause significant irritation to our delicate tissues. I think I also successfully altered the weather to shut down precipitation here for some time.
While my nose dripped at an ever-increasing rate, I built a barrier of old, moldy hay bales in the trees by our uphill neighbor’s corn field.
During heavy rain, the water comes off that field in a torrent and washes sediment onto our property. Lately, it has started to fill in a drainage trench beside our driveway.
Oddly enough, I actually wanted it to rain today, so I could see if my creation worked as intended, but the forecast shows no precipitation expected in the days ahead.
Given that, I guess my project worked. It has stopped the sediment from pouring into our trench, hasn’t it?
While I was working in the tangled bramble of uncontrolled growth that forms the border between our property and that cultivated field to the north of us, I decided to finally address a remnant of rusted barbed wire fencing that had been swallowed by a tree.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The tree had long ago been cut off, leaving a stump that was about the height of a fence post. Made sense, since the barbed wire ran through the tree, it was already functioning as a fence post.
Removing the rusted fencing was made easier by the fact the tree was rotting to pieces. So much of it came apart simply by prying at it with one of the old fence posts that I found myself struggling near the end, to finish it off in the same manner. Eventually, logic, and my increasingly irritating allergic reactions to pollen, led me to hasten the task by way of the chain saw.
The area looks like it has been through a serious spring cleaning now, with the added benefit of opening up visibility to the area where water flows off the neighbor’s field. It is easier to see if the barrier I built is doing the job of keeping sediment out of our ditch.
Sneeze. Cough. Drip. Stinging blink. It’s the hazardous working conditions of spring!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 