Bleed for Me

I was never what you'd call a 'sickly' child. I didn't have asthma like my older and handsomer brother Dave. Look at him, isn't he cute? But, no, I didn't have hemophilia or any sort of wasting disease like consumption which was really usually just tuberculosis.

Interestingly, my grandfather, Peter Kleylein, did die of tuberculosis, but as far as I know my brother never had consumption. Just asthma... and bad shirts.

So, although I wasn't sickly, I was thin. Of course, in those days, we never used such a politically correct word as 'thin'. In those days, I was 'skinny'. I was a skinny kid and I couldn't put weight on if you held a gun to my head. I could knock back a pint of chocolate ice cream or a whole huge bag of Hershey's Kisses (mmm, Hershey's kisses) at one sitting.

So, for the first two thirds of my life, I could eat as much as I wished - of ANYTHING. When I was working the midnight to eight shift as a Controls Analyst at Eastern Airlines in Miami I brought five sandwiches (homemade bread sandwiches!) with me. I had one at the first break, three for lunch and the last at the last break. Didn't gain an ounce.

The first time I noticed a change was in my mid-forties. I attended a week-long management seminar for SMS and sure enough, they had food out all the time. Doughnuts and bagels and candy and coffee and huge lunches and dinners (oh, my). At the end of the week, I noticed all my pants seemed to have shrunk around the waist.

OMG! It wasn't my pants! It was me! Boy, talk about a sobering moment. Fortunately, having tight pants annoys me, so I got it under control.

I had put weight on while I was in the Navy, but I was working out all the time and it didn't laser-zoom to my waist like this did. Now, I had to think about what I was eating, what a pain.

But this post started out talking about being sickly and other than colds and the flu, some shattered bones in my hand (thanks US Navy) and skin cancer (thanks Miami), I had been keeping myself together.

My brother had many bouts with kidney stones (boy, talk about an affliction!), but no such sickly stuff for me. Until now. Now, my nose has decided to bleed. What the hell?

Apparently, it's very common, as least that's what the doctor told me. I ran to the doc like a frightened puppy because I was sure I was dying of maybe nose cancer. But she pooh-poohed me and smacked me upside of my head (it would have been funny if my nose had started to bleed). "It's common", she said, "you're common." So, it just bleeds a little and then stops.

Usually.

Except for this one time when I was having dinner with my wife and I blew my nose into my handkerchief (remember handkerchiefs?) Handkerchiefs were supposedly invented by Marie Antoinette who was so upset about leaving Austria that she cried all the way to France. She tore pieces of lace off her outfit to wipe away the bitter, bitter tears. What a pisser being sent off to be Queen of France! She was never without a piece of lace after that and started a trend.

So, I blew my nose (it's winter, after all) into Marie's lace underwear and this gusher of bright, arterial blood came out and wouldn't stop for anything. Naturally, just as I was holding my (by now) bright red hankie jammed up my right nostril (it's only my right one that bleeds) the waitress (wait-person) walks up, looks at me sharply and asks 'if everything was all right'.

Over the sopping hankie, I look up at her blandly as if nothing was wrong at all and said, "Oh, yeah, everything's fine!" I was thinking how macho all this blood must make me look.

As she walked away, she was probably thinking, "Hmph, that cokehead must have burned his whole nose out."