Tag Pneumonia

Happy Hot Sauce Day

Michael 8 Comments

Happy Hot Sauce Day! 😲 I’m not sure if that really should be capitalized but it sounds official enough so why not. I’ve looked into it but have not been able to determine the origin of Hot Sauce Day but I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s relatively new and was dreamed up by a marketing company. I’m guessing it’s fairly new because when I was growing up there weren’t many hot sauces out there so there wouldn’t have been a need for a “day” and it probably would have been called chili pepper sauce day not hot sauce day. And I’m guessing it was the brain child of a marketing group because I’m not stupid.

Hot Sauce Day is a particularly significant day for me this year. I am finally getting some appetite back having been set back by pneumonia now going into its third week. But just because I want to eat doesn’t mean I can taste much of what I eat. Thus the addition of strong flavors to my foods. It’s amazing what a splash or two of Tabasco will do to scrambled eggs.

HotSauceTabasco is one of two hot sauces I keep in my pantry. The other is Frank’s. I don’t get any remuneration from either but if one, the other, or both would like to make an offer, I’m all taste buds.

Frank’s is the hot sauce most often associated with Buffalo wings although it serves a more subtle use in my kitchen. Anything made with ground beef, chicken, or turkey, such as meatloaf gets a few splashes of Frank’s. So too do most sauces and braising liquids. Tabasco, being lighter and more acidic is added to most dressings and marinades.

So today being Hot Sauce Day in one way isn’t such a big thing for me. Almost every day is Hot Sauce Day to me. On the other hand it’s a really big deal because instead of the controlled restraint I usually use on my hot sauce, today and for a few more I’ll be pouring it on like the typical macho bar fly uses his hot sauce. As a weapon against his taste buds.

Fortunately my taste buds are just as incapacitated as the rest of me and can stand a little extra jolt. Hmm. Jolt? No, that would be November 19, Carbonated Beverage with Caffeine Day. I wouldn’t make that up.

 

Pneumania

Michael 14 Comments

“Yeah, they sound pretty junky.”  Not the thing you want to hear from your doctor while he’s pressing a stethoscope against your back but what I expected to hear from the time I woke up seven hours earlier. It would be “official” when the x-ray results showed what looked like the course diagram of a nine hole golf course where my right lower lung should be but I was pretty sure I had pneumonia when I coughed myself awake around 4 Monday morning.

I’d been moving slower than usual and had a little cough for a couple days before but I hadn’t considered that I was actually any sicker than usual. If it wasn’t for the fever, chills, dizziness, shortness of breath, and inability to get out of bed without falling over I might have thought I was overreacting when I said to myself, “Self, this ain’t no man flu. You got pneumania. You should call someone,” in between gasps.

ChestXrayYes, pneumania is a real thing. It’s just like the pneumonia that non-men get only it’s real. It’s not the “cough, cough, oh I feel so bad I think I have pneumonia but I’ll still make breakfast and pack everybody’s lunch then go to work and come home and still clean the house before I make a gourmet dinner then I’ll work on my hand crafted head bands for my Etsy shop and write 3 or 4 thousand words for my novel” type of pneumonia. No. What I have is a real pneumonia. A man’s pneumonia. Pneumania!

Ok, it’s true. You can get a little loopy from too much cough syrup. But hey, I got photograph proof that my life is in jeopardy. And not just from your lack of compassion. So there! 😛

Hmm. That might mean more if I didn’t live alone.

Cough, cough.

Sorry.

Cough.