whiskey in a teacup . com

This afternoon at the doctor’s office, a woman and I were sitting in the waiting area for the phlebotomist. She asked me what I was having done, and told me she was not looking forward to her tetanus shot. I murmured politely in response. A moment later, apropos of absolutely nothing, she said, “So what do you call two gay Irishmen?” She dropped the foul punchline and I told her I’d never heard that one.

What I didn’t tell her was that Darryl, the phlebotomist we were waiting for, had stuck me many times over the years, and not only was I quite certain that he was homosexual, but that his surname is common to both the Scots and the Irish, and furthermore he and his collection of large-bore needles were well within earshot of her and her amazingly random and indecent joke.

Luckily for her, and sadly for me, Darryl is not the malicious type.

While sleeping in my mother-in-law’s bed this past weekend, I dreamed of a gigantic spider, and pancakes. I also dreamed that I was at the bottom of some sort of cave-like dwelling, and a bear was looking in at me, and someone threw a baby bear into the dwelling with me and I balked, and the thrower mocked me, and I said, well, that’s how you’d react too if someone threw a bear at you.

This morning the light woke me up very early, so I made an eye mask with a corner of the bedsheet and fell back asleep. I dreamed that my primary care physician was walking shirtless around a communal apartment and I was doing some laundry (probably his). Incidentally, I am going to see him today and he looks a bit like Will Ferrell.

In non-dream news, the mister and I won a weekend round of Pictionary when he drew what he would later describe as “the Cartesian theater of the mind” and I yelled “Hallucinate!”. Later, my Brazilian quasi-brother-in-law was confronted with a drawing of a squid, and in a noble attempt to Americanize the Portuguese tentáculo he guessed “ten-tack-you-luss” which was, at the time, just about the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

Some townie outside a pub, taking a smoke break at 430 this lovely Saturday afternoon, yelling at a truck with out-of-state plates as it barrelled into oncoming traffic:

“Hey, get off the phone!  You’re going the wrong way down a one-way street, you fucking New Jersey prick!”

Every day last week I woke up with a sore throat and a feeling of doom. The sore throat prodrome before a cold is one of my very least favorite sensations in life, as it foretells an even sorer throat and then the misery of the cold itself. However, each day I would go to work and come home feeling more or less fine. Then I’d wake up the next day with the same foreboding soreness.

Yesterday my body finally mounted a reasonable facsimile of an immune response, and I began with the coughing and the sneezing. It was quite mild and I took some cold medicine only to avoid sliming my clients at work. I went to bed and fell asleep without incident. When I woke up, I discovered that my nose had become congested to the point of being useless as an oxygen transmission device, so for the greater good, my mouth had assumed breathing duty all night. Since I sleep on my stomach, this means my open jaw was mashed into the pillow at a certain angle and had gotten stiff by the time I woke up. This is nothing unusual for me, and in fact my jaw occasionally gets locked in the mornings such that I have to massage it a bit to make it open all the way. This morning, however, it really got stuck and has remained so all day. I can talk, and I can eat most foods (sandwich yes, apple no!), but despite all my rubbing and wiggling I cannot get my damned jaw to open all the way.

This is one of those stupid health problems that causes minor discomfort and moderate annoyance, and yet offers no collateral benefits. I am not sick enough to demand that Jared make me dinner or to stay home from work. I’m also not well enough that I can eat a banana out of the peel like nature intended instead of breaking off a piece with my fingers and mashing it through the half-inch of space I can create between my upper and lower teeth. I’ll probably be right as rain by tomorrow if I leave my poor jaw alone and stick to soft foods that I can gum into a bolus instead of crunchy, chewy fare. There is some risk that tonight’s runny nose will lead to yet another pillow-eating situation that will only exacerbate my problem, but alas. This is by far the stupidest thing that has happened to me this week, which is no small feat to accomplish.

A wise woman once pondered the age-old conundrum: “How do you tell someone it’s over? You send them a notarized letter, right? But what if the recipient is your notary?”

Fortunately I have the information age to solve a related quandary for me: how do you tell someone who has just lost a treasured friend, but who is the stoic sort and doesn’t need to receive some sentimental email from you while he’s at work (or ever, really), that you are thinking of him (and of her, and the awesome life he gave her)? You wait until the workday is over and then let him come across your condolences in an RSS feed, and hope that he finds some comfort.

Tomorrow in the early dawn Jared will return from a business trip. He has gone on many such trips and I’ve learned to enjoy holding down the proverbial fort by myself, because honestly, whose company could be better than my own? It’s not without its downsides, though, so I’ve compiled some pros and cons of being alone all week.

Con: Eating alone, watching movies alone.

Pro: Total creative control over dinner and media consumption.

Con: Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.

Pro: Don’t have to climb over a sleeping body in the morning. Plus, zero threat of being victim of dutch oven situation.

Con: No one to fix computer problems.

Pro: Ability to do aerobics to Flashdance soundtrack unseen by anyone but the cat.

Con: Have to do all the chores myself (even the crappy ones!) instead of delegating them to spouse.

Pro: Get to do laundry as often as I please without anyone complaining.

Con: General lack of companionship.

Pro: Don’t have to overhear any damn techno music coming from companion’s speakers.

It’s basically a draw, but I will be awfully glad to see him in the morning.

The toilets at work flooded, sending a constant gush of what we all hoped was water onto the bathroom floors.  One of my co-workers, a Boston native, was mopping furiously when she paused to sniff with a contemplative look on her face.  “It doesn’t smell like pee or poop,” she said.  “It smells like…Southie.”

The following are a few passages from the Nabokov novel Pnin, which I dog-eared or otherwise annotated when I read it sometime last year. I reproduce them here because reading this kind of writing makes me feel genuinely happy to be alive. I laughed, I cried, though not because of the story, per se.

(As a side note, Nabokov has a fun way of really making you work for it by throwing lots of non-English text and dialogue into his books. I recently re-experienced Lolita by listening to the audiobook version, and an alarming amount of that book is randomly in French. I can understand written French with basic competence, but spoken is another matter. [Side side note: audiobooks are fantastic for commutes, although listening to Jeremy Irons narrate a bunch of sexy stuff will guarantee that your face is tellingly flushed when you get to work in the morning.] Pnin features French and German, which I can more or less translate, but also a lot of Russian…so there were whole bits of the book, little in-jokes that will be hidden to me unless I learn my mother tongue.)

1) …and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure, our friend applied himself to the pleasant task of Pninizing his new quarters.

2) His explosive “hat” (’I never go in a hat even in winter’) differed from the common American pronunciation of “hot” (typical of Waindell townspeople, for example) only by its briefer duration, and thus sounded very much like the German verb hat (has) . . . He did not posses (nor was he aware of this lack) any long oo: all he could muster when called upon to utter ‘noon’ was the lax vowel of the German ‘nun‘. (”I have no classes in afternun on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.”)

3) A three-year-old child, when asked to copy a square, shapes one recognizable corner and then is content to render the rest of the outline as wavy or circular; but Victor at three not only copied the researcher’s (Dr. Liza Wind’s) far from ideal square with contemptuous accuracy but added a smaller one beside the copy. He never went through that initial stage of graphic activity when infants draw Kopffüsslers (tadpole people), or humpty dumpties with L-like legs, and arms ending in rake prongs; in fact, he avoided the human form altogether and when pressed by Papa (Dr. Eric wind) to draw Mama (Dr. Liza Wind), responded with a lovely undulation, which he said was her shadow on the new refrigerator.

4) With the help of the janitor he screwed onto one side of the desk a pencil sharpener - that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

For the first couple months of this blog’s existence, I was in the habit of making a small infographic depicting the search terms that brought people to the site. As the site “grew” the number of search terms became too many, and too uninteresting, to bother posting. This site’s name is somewhat of a curse because I don’t actually drink whiskey, or know anything about it, or care. On another note, I talk a great deal about my bladder which attracts quite a few medical fetishist hits.

However, I get a lot of legitimate healthcare-related terms, many phrased in the form of actual questions, and since I’m a nurse I figure I could actually answer some of them, as well as some of the non-medical queries that lead people here. Thus I am launching a new site feature: ask whiskey in a teacup! Let’s do this thing.

things found in the pharmacy to get fucked up on

Dude, if you drink two whole bottles of magnesium citrate really fast it gets you TOTALLY fucked up. Try it tonight.

painful raised bump could it be parasite

Yes. It could also be hypochondriasis.

the proper way of doing a narcotic count with another nurse?

Don’t just listen to her (or him, whatever) read off the count; actually look at the narc book while she’s reading so you can verify that what she’s saying is accurate. Then offer the same courtesy to the nurse that relieves you. Do not physically accept the keys at the beginning of the count; only take them at the end. I only had to do narcotic counts for about four months and people tried to fuck me over more than once.

how to flush a g-tube

Check placement first by aspirating the stomach contents or pushing in some air and auscultating with your stethoscope. Then put the Gtube syringe into the tube and let the flush flow in by gravity. Only push with the plunger if you meet resistance. If you have to push, wrap a paper towel around the junction of the Gtube and syringe unless you want to get sprayed in the face with stomach contents.

what should i do to concentrate on my study when my mind is occupied by unnecessary things

I find it helps when I’m actually interested in what I’m studying. Why would you be paying to take a course in something that doesn’t appeal to you? If it’s just filler, like you need to fulfill some English requirement for your degree or whatever, then it’s probably also pretty easy and you can futz your way through it. But anyway, study breaks every hour or so, and try to burn off some energy beforehand so you’re relaxed and prepared to concentrate.

does whiskey kill cold sores

No, and neither does abreva. Buy a tube of chapstick, keep your fingers away from your lips, and be patient.  Cold sores are caused by a herpesvirus that you will have for the rest of your life, but outbreaks will most likely occur only during illness, stress, that sort of thing.

it hurts when i pass urine up into my bladder

It would probably stop hurting if you instead allowed urine to pass down out of your bladder as per the natural order of things.

colostomy bags how much waste does it hold

You really don’t want to be filling these things to capacity. If it’s a third full, change it. Oh, and don’t forget to burp the gas out periodically as well.

cause of colostomy bag break

It’s full of shit. See above.

is whisky good for you if sick

I don’t know where people picked up the idiotic notion that hot toddies or other hard liquor based drinks help you recover from illness. Your liver has more important things to do than deal with all that Jim Beam you’re downing. Drink some water or juice and let your body heal itself.

what type of glasses did walter sobchak wear the big lebowski?

With regard to this question, I am out of my element, Donny.