Notes from Maine - 2023/02/26

The other day I coughed while I was drinking. Liquid shot out of my nose and I was reminded of swimming when I was a little kid. Seemed like pool water was always getting into my sinuses. Eventually I learned to breathe out through my nose so I didn’t have to squeeze it shut when I jumped in, or when I did an underwater backflip. 

It’s been two days. My nose is still stuffy. Maybe it’s just the liquid infusion? Maybe I caught a cold? Maybe it’s just too damp dry up here this time of year. I’m not running a humidifier at the moment. I’m pretty sure I haven’t caught anything. I don’t have any other symptoms. Some swear by their neti pots. That’s not for me. I’m not putting anything up my nose on purpose.

When we were little, my sister put a balloon up her nose. We had to go the emergency room to get it taken out. They knew us over there. I broke a few fingers (some of those were not my fault) and got stitches a bunch. One time I was trying to grab a basketball and smashed my head into a cinderblock wall—forehead stitches. One time I fell down the brick porch steps—inside the lip stitches. One time I put my hand through the glass on the storm door—no stitches but a great scar. You get the point. I was in the ER about once each year, and that was just me. My brother and sister were not exactly strangers there.

It was Saint Patrick’s Day, by the way. That’s why my sister put the balloon up her nose. The balloon was green and it was Saint Patrick’s Day. I put my hand through the glass because my father was catching up on chores. The latch on the storm door had been broken for months, so I would just run at it and push it open. The day he fixed the latch, I put my hand through the glass. 

Noses made up solid chunk of our hospital visits. Once or twice, my brother and I both got bloody noses that kept going and going. Doctors and nurses tried various methods until the bleeding eventually stopped. It was unclear in the end what caused them or why they stopped. At least it was unclear to me. Maybe someone else knew. 

A friend had his toddler in Home Depot one day, took his son’s hand, and found out that the kid was carrying a dime. The coin had disappeared the day before. From the state of the coin, it was decided that the dime had traveled inside the kid’s nose for about twenty-four hours. That same child was later X-Rayed and a penny was discovered in his stomach. He was a living piggy bank.

Back to my sinuses—I’m pretty sure that my issue is just the dry air. I might hunt down a humidifier. There are a couple around here somewhere. Yesterday I went to help a friend fix some burst pipes. His mother’s house has been empty for a while and the pipes froze. We found three splits and patched in PEX to fix the leaks. The house was flooded. I’m afraid that it’s going to be a nightmare of mold by the spring. Trying to cut a pipe, I pressed my forehead against a wall and it gave under the pressure. The gypsum was soaked several feet up.

His brother-in-law died because of something similar. It’s terrible to think about. My friend’s brother-in-law was cleaning up a house after a hurricane flooded it. The mold in the drywall gave him a lung infection that killed him. That’s all I could think about as we fixed the immediate problems so we could turn the water and power back on. 

By the way, I probably have a lot of inaccuracies in this little note. Facts turn into stories over the years and stories drift. I had to reach out to my sister to remember that it was her with the balloon up her nose. It seemed right, but it also didn’t sound like something she would do.

Last week, I passed along the “wisdom” that horses have to learn things separately with both eyes. A neuroscientist (I’ll withhold their name since we haven’t discussed if they’d like to be credited) reached out to me to say that horses have a perfectly normal corpus callosum connecting the hemispheres of their brains, so both sides have access to the same information. I should have known—horse people are always making stuff up. Maybe that’s why I’m a horse person. I enjoy making stuff up.