You know who you are.
(The following contains descriptions which may be rendered very graphically by your imagination. If you are sensitive, and a non smoker [but only if you are both] please skip this post and search for Frozen Custard instead.)
Yesterday afternoon Martina and I watched South Africa draw with Mexico in the first game of the world cup. We had limped there together and the Sangria was beginning to work nearly as quickly as the anaesthetic was wearing off her little foot.
Along came an older gentleman, fairly incapacitated due to a lack of oxygen in the blood, it seemed. He gurgled through a hole two inches beneath his adam’s apple. Struggling to speak, he loosened his scarf and pulled out a small mirror to inspect the excavation. Then he proceeded to gurgle up a cacophony of substances. ‘Gurgle’ does not really capture the sound: imagine a symphony of cement and gravel being shoveled, backed by several imbalanced dice being rolled in a wooden dice-thrower, and accompanied by some twangs of out-of-tune, about to snap vocal chords. Or, imagine a digeridoo, lined with two inches of slimy, un-homogenised mucous, playing Carmina Burana, kept in rhythm with the repetition of a bushman’s saw rasping through a rotting redgum railway sleeper.
The stage is set. After several bars of the symphony a set of very long tweezers – a conductor’s baton – pause the chamber reheasal. With eyes firmly on the mirrored excavation, the conductor reaches inside and grasps first slime, then bloody mucous, now something indistiguishable. The baton is inspected and hurriedly wiped on a tissue each time before being reinserted. And each time the conductor reaches too far, he winces as the pointy metal hits the back of his oesophagus.
The show has many encores, bur we cannot stay on. My companion’s blood loss, shock, stitches and waning anaesthic have proven too strong an oers d’oevre for such a dramatic concerto. We must leave.
South Africa 1, Mexico 1. My smoker friends 0, when you do this to yourself and expect my companionship.
(Well-paid job offers with anti-smoking agencies may be forwarded to ahatzis(at)tpg.com.au)
I must get back to breakfast. Aurevoir!
Pretty horrible isn’t it, as a nurse, I have been on the other end of that procedure, the one trying to clear an airway, at the same time trying to avoid the end result of stimulating a cough reflex with a suction catheter! And also trying to avoid throwing up, while acting professional……there are lots of reasons to dislike what I do for a living!