BOOGAGE REDUX

Rob Smith, Gawd love him, has thrown down the Green and Crusty Gauntlet of Booger-Blogging with a post about the Substance that Dare Not Speak Its Name. Boogers!

I have written about this unsavory subject in days past...but I am not above revisiting previously trod pastures. Offering a Fresh Perspective, as it were.

Let us wind the clock back to August of 2002, when I underwent surgery to correct a deviated septum. This was a problem that had (unbeknownst to me) plagued me all my life, contributing significantly to a Sleep Apnea condition that was severe enough to place me in jeopardy of sudden death - every frickin’ night.

When my ENT guy examined me, he snaked a foot-long fiber-optic probe up my nose. Gaaaah. And then he said, “You may think you’ve been breathing through that nose of yours...but you never have.”

And thus it was that I was to go under the knife for the first time in my (then) nearly fifty-year lifespan, in order to have what the Sawbones called a Septoplasty and Turbinate Reduction.

The surgery was noneventful. One moment I was lying on the operating table as the anesthesiologist injected me with a bolus of Versed; the next moment I was dressed and sitting in a wheelchair, ready to roll out the door. The only evidence of the surgery - aside from a bunch of stitches that were well-hidden inside the ol’ Snoot d’Elisson - was a piece of gauze taped over the end of my nose.

Part of the recovery process involved twice-a-day irrigation with warm, sterile salt water. Most people use a nasal syringe for this purpose. But not Mr. Smart-Brains. Using my engineering knowledge, I sawed the end off a Water Pik nozzle, creating a stubby Pressure Washing Device that could be held in each nostril in its turn while hosing out my entire sinus cavity with hot, pulsating streams of salt water. It’s a most disturbing sensation - like drowning in a boiling ocean - but surprisingly, I got accustomed to it.

You do not want to know what will come out of your head under those conditions.

After several weeks, it was once again safe to blow my nose. And that’s when things got scary.

One day - I was visiting our Corporate Headquarters at the time - I blew my nose. In the process I must have disloged a chunk of my brain, for what emerged appeared to be capable of sentience...a scabrous lump of grey-green spongy matter, fully the size of a grown man’s thumb...or an Economy-Size Gulf Oyster.

I swear, it almost looked like it had eyes. And veins. It definitely had veins!

The only thing that kept me from screaming like a little girl was my desire to observe a level of decorum appropriate to a Corporate Headquarters.

What Booger Horror Stories can you share?