I have tonsillitis. Upon waking this morning, I staggered to the shower. Under the hot water, I blew my nose into the palm of my right hand. And blew, and blew. It felt like warm custard pouring from my nose.
The ensuing mess was pale green, and covered half my palm. It had little hills and valleys, and a football stadium-like air bubble. Fascinated, I poked the bubble with my index finger but it wouldn’t pop, only quiver and shake, before sliding off my hand and slithering down the drain.
I had a cold, with an incredibly stuffy nose. I would blow and blow and blow but nothing would relieve it. Until I blocked one nostril and blew very gently and this nugget flew out of my nose and landed on my right pinky. It was a bit larger than a gumdrop, golden yellow in color and flecked in red.
This happened twice, on different colds. It landed on the same pinky, however.
A friend of mine told me this story which was so memorable that I now pass it on to you.
He was out in his back garden when he was a kid. Feeling his nose a bit stuffed up he blocked one nostril and gave a great blow – only to find a rather long sticky stringer dangling from his nose. Not really wanting to touch it he kind of shook his head hoping it would drop free. It only stretched. More vigourous shaking and he managed to wrap the offending greenie right round the back of his head and have it stick onto his cheek.
Our youngest daughter was famous for her dangling snot. She would sneeze and two slimy, yet resiliant, strings of snot would hang out of her nostrils below her chin. She could walk back from the church podium to our seat and they still wouldn’t break or fall. Eventually, everyone in our small church began carrying extra tissue with them just in case she had a snotty nose that week Luckily, she’s 11 now and her unique talent (ahem) has dried up.
I’ve always used “snot” to denote the crusty, mostly-solid stuff you need to dig out of a nostril, and “mucus” to denote the stringy, mostly-liquid stuff that comes out from blowing. Does anyone else use this terminology?
When I still lived at home in TX, I was walking home from . . . somewhere with my step-sister through the Dell parking lot. She has a stuffy nose, so she decided to do a Farmer Blow (classy). Well, on finger on left nostril, deep breath, blew out, and . . .
Out comes a sticky string of snot, which swings back, directly into her mouth.
Nope. Those crusty things are boogers and everything else is snot. I’ve had a cold/sinus infection for 10 days now with no end in sight so I believe I’m an expert on such matters.
True fun is when you are in public, feel the need for a little blow of the nose, take a single piece of tissue, and…unleash a sinus-clearing flood of snot, filling your hand and overwhelming the tissue. Then you have to look around, trying to find something to wipe your hand on and praying that no-one saw you.
heehee
I hate that. Only in my case it’s always the result of a non-tissued sneeze.
Every two years or so I get this sinus infection thingy which does not blow out my nose, but if I do that “hocking a loogey while inhaling” thing I produce this huge mass of pink, infected-flesh-looking wad of gunk that looks like wet scar tissue.
Thankfully I was at home the only time I was visited by the technicolor snot fairy. I’d never had a sinus infection and was having ever so much fun what with the pain, stuffed up and dripping, chapped, bleeding nose, etc. Finally it was just about over when I went to blow my nose and kept blowing and blowing, like some sort of saxophone solo from hell.
After about two minutes, something just sort of snapped free in my head and I swear it felt like my brain had come loose and was traveling through my sinuses and down my nostrils. All of a sudden my tissue was heavy and whatever was lurking in there was warm and soft and jiggly. Trying to process that I’d somehow managed to blow my brains out into a tissue was rather difficult, for obvious reasons, so you can understand how I made the very bad decision to look inside the tissue.
Erkleblerg! Did you know that snot can be brown? Many, many different shades of brown, with flecks of grey, a little river of sulfur yellow running through, and threads of red blood like delicate veins through the clear, well, membrane that encased my homegrown work of art. I might not have won any prizes for it, but darned if I couldn’t breathe freely for the first time in a week.
I had a sinus infection at the end of last year, and every time I sneezed, a straw-colored watery fluid would drip from my snotlocker. Even running over to get a tissue was not fast enough, and I would drip on the floor. After some expensive antibiotics, it cleared up nicely.
The year before, I had some kind of cold where after some labored bugger-blowing, I would get a yellow-orange rope of surprising tensile strength.
I feel that if the future can be divined by entrails or rolled bones, then snot qualifies as well. It may only tell you that you have a pricey prescription in your future, but I figure that counts.
Ah, you guys are great. You make my infected head parts hurt as I struggle to laugh.
As the outpouring of pale green snot continued yesterday, I wondered whether I should attempt to quantity the level of liquid skank venting from my nasal cavity. I mused that if I carefully kept all my spent tissues in a pile, at the end of the day I could weigh the total stinking mass, subtract the average weight of a clean tissue multiplied by the number of dirty tissues in the pile and calculate…
