Just in from the Realm of TMI: Pink Snot

Among the myriad references to Alecia Moore, if you do a Google search on the word "pink" you'll learn that "the color pink makes everything look pretty." 

I believe I have the counter-example disproving that particular theory. 

I know I have previously mentioned my abhorrent sinuses, but to expand just a little bit, if you had ever seen my Mum you would've been forgiven for wondering why she had arms like Popeye.* Mum used her sleeves to store her stock of tissues that she needed to deal with her constantly running nose.** And whatever gene sequence defines the operation of one's sinuses, in my case those genes are completely and entirely my mother's. No paternal mitigation at all. Even under the best of circumstances, without any of the triggers (e.g., a change in temperature of half a degree or so) triggering, I can go through an entire box of Kleenex in a day. Thanks Mum!

I would not call my current situation the best of circumstances. As noted previously, my new lack of nose hair means that a running nose is less a minor inconvenience than a potential crisis. Seeing the kid on the bus with a big bulb of snot hanging from their nose is bad enough, seeing the adult version in the mirror is repulsive. 

But wait. There's more. The chemotherapy is also drying out my entire system; in the case of my nose, not enough to stop it from running but enough to make the capillary walls that line my sinuses somewhat fragile. In the worst of circumstances, fragile capillaries lead to nose bleeds (which have been a problem). But what's been true for the last few weeks is that the fragile capillaries are leading not to nose bleeds, but to a head full of blood-infused  -- i.e., pink -- snot. 

So now my morning now starts with a trip to the nearest box of tissues where I will fill dozens of them with alarming quantities of pink snot. For awhile I was throwing the used tissues in the toilet, but was disturbed to see the water turning red so have taken to throwing them in the bin.

It's colorful way to start your morning, I will give it that. But getting back to my original point, pink does not make snot pretty. I have now seen more than enough of it to make that assertion with 100% confidence. 

And for the record, I did mention in the title to this post that we working in the realm of TMI, so it's your own fault if you've learned something about me that you didn't want to know. 


* I'm kidding, but only a little bit.
** If you caught laundry duty, you always had to be sure to check Mum's sleeves, especially on her bathrobe, for stray tissues. Sending a bathrobe with a sleeve full of tissues through the laundry cycle was a mistake you only made once.