A RANT BEFORE DRY-HEAVING

You know how sometimes you get sinus drainage that runs down your throat, but not all the way down your throat, so your spit is the consistency of epoxy and you’re gobbing into a Kleenex three times every five minutes just so you don’t suffocate because your nasty saliva is threatening to block your windpipe and eventually enough of the goo makes it downward so you start hacking up lungers and you do that for about three days until you’ve got all the stuff coughed out of your lungs, except that when it’s gone, now your windpipes are majorly inflamed so you cough even more violently and it just won’t get better because now you actually need mucus down there except there isn’t any so eventually you start coughing so hard you wouldn’t be surprised to see your shoes come flying out of your mouth, and eventually even the worst coughing fits come to a close, except that when they do it’s like somebody took a fork and did what your grandmother does to unpeeled cucumbers before she slices them–you know, takes a fork and gouges little parallel lines all up and down–so then you’re so inflamed from the pharynx to the palate that you can’t even speak, and you discover that those Luden’s “throat drops” actually are good for something, except that when you’ve finished with the throat drop, your saliva is starting to feel like cold pancake syrup again and you know it’s just a matter of time before you’re bent over the sink, red-faced and wheezing, eyes watering, totally unsure of whether you hope you do puke, or hope you don’t, until you realize that if you were going to puke, you’d have done so on the first retch and not the eleventh, so you know that it’s just a matter of time until you grab another Luden’s and try to figure out how to untangle this Gordian knot that your respiratory system has become?

I don’t like that.