Tied up in knots

It has come to my attention that the few ardent Christine Wy followers are clamoring for new, fun stories about me. I gotta tell ya, there’s not much fun going on in the world of Christine since I’ve started packing. In the past three weeks, I’m managed to have two head colds. The first was much worse and took a while to recover. This one has been no cakewalk, but I’m recovering pretty quickly. I would describe my head colds best as “inconvenient.” I’m supposed to be cranking out packed boxes like Satan’s fire awaits me at every pitfall. Instead, I’m in bed with ginger ale and tissues. Such is life, right? Just when you need to perform, you fall apart.

This segues nicely into a fun story you’ve never heard about Christine: The Snot Rope.

I’ve always been prone to head colds, and, as a younger person, they frequently developed into serious sinus infections. (After several years of better patient information and treatment options, they don’t get as severe as they used to.) In middle school, I got a real doozy of an infection, and thick, green snot just settled in my sinuses like retiree RV campers. I was sick for a month. I took the medicine, but the snot just wouldn’t go away.

My sister and I shared a room, and we often liked to get into each other’s beds before we feel to sleep. During the vicious sinus infection, my sister came and got into my bed, and we laid there giggling and teasing each other. After a month of immobilized snot residency, I finally felt the tickle that indicated that maybe snot was ready to begin to vacate.

The nose blow turned out to be no ordinary mucus decampment. I blew and I blew, and I could just feel the thick stuff moving through my nose. I pulled the tissue away from my face to adjust to a new spot, and I felt mucus still attached to my nose on one end, and newly attached to the Kleenex on the other. This was resilient stuff; I moved, but the snot just kept on stretching.

I reached up and touched the snot that was so resolutely attached to both the Kleenex and my nose. What I felt was an extraordinarily dry viscously thick strand of nasal sludge. I don’t know why, but I put my hands on the nose slider, and I decided to pull. It moved, and it didn’t break. I was pulling a rope of desiccated goo out of my nostril. I pulled and pulled, exclaiming over and over to my sister, “Oh my god, it’s like a rope of snot! I’m pulling my snot out of my face! Oh my god; it’s still going! It won’t stop!”

And it wouldn’t. I kept pulling, and I literally felt my face get lighter as I pulled. My sinuses felt relieved of their heavy burden they’d been hauling around for a month.

Eventually the snot rope ran out, and I felt pounds lighter. Giddy over my sinus triumph, I tried the other side. While not as tough as the other sinus--I believe it was my right that yielded the snot rope--Leftie did purge a fragile thread of mucus that I could pull a little, blow a little, and gradually coax out of my sinus shell.

Relief. The relief I felt at unburdening my face was indescribable. My sister and I stayed up in bed laughing at the snot rope. I tried to get her to touch it, but she was smarter than me, and figured snot was best left to Kleenexes to handle.

To this day, I’ve always wanted another snot rope, but I’ve never replicated that particular joy. Sure, I never want to have that severe of a sinus infection again, but, if I must, I totally want a snot rope to come out the other end.