Or, as Dana Farber calls it, "nasal wash."
After my big 6 month blog post about infection control, guess what?! I have a chest cold. So I called my doctor yesterday, who told me to come in for a chest x-ray and a nasal wash. Sounds simple enough, right? Oh dear. A nasal wash involves spraying saline down into your nose while you lie down, neck open like you would be positioned for CPR. Then they suck it out, put it in a vial and see if anything viral grows over the next 24 hours. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable it is to have liquid forcibly injected into your breathing apparatus even for a very short time, even when you know that they are immediately going to suck it back out and that you are indeed going to breathe again. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable it is when they say, "Oh, we didn't get enough; we'll need to do it again." It is really really not a pleasant feeling, and the weird "water should not have been in there" feeling stays with you for the rest of the day.
We're still waiting for the results. In the meantime it made me ponder waterboarding. Yes, I AM so self-involved as to speak of a minor medical procedure and torture in the same sentence. But that's the point, isn't it? That safe and minor procedure was so uncomfortable and so icky in that not-as-God-or-nature-intended kind of way (and remember that I am, at this point, a woman of extremely high pain threshold) that it absolutely confirmed in my mind that waterboarding cannot be considered anything but torture, both physical and mental. And don't tell me that waterboarding is really just an assertive interview technique called "simulated drowning." Friends, if someone poured water down your cakehole, wouldn't you call that ACTUAL attempted drowning? Simulated, my a**.
IMHO, people have the luxury of calling something "not torture" only when they have not undergone it. My recommendation for anyone who wonders if waterboarding is torture, is to just get a little nasal wash. Seriously. Just a little, safe, no-big-deal, routine procedure that involves a few cc's of liquid in your respiratory system. That is all it will take to demonstrate that one drop more liquid and one less caring physician would make that the worst experience of your life.
2 comments:
Why do you hate America and love terrorists, E? Was it the falafel? Did they seduce you with the delicious, tempting, and erotic* falafel? Or was it the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife? E, need I remind you that virgin men are not necessarily desirable? You could probably go through the 72 of them in, like eight minutes.
Anyway, how can you betray America? Don't you know that waterboarding is something to be PROUD of? And how do we know it is right? Well, E, I'm glad you asked. We know it is right because we can imagine scenarios in which it would be right. Like if we had Osama bin Laden and we knew for a sure that a bomb was about to explode in a preschool and only Osama knows about it and waterboarding will definitely get the information, then we'd agree we could waterboard, right? That's exactly why the government needs the power to indiscriminately waterboard brown people or people who, in the right light, might or might not look brown.
*Bill O'Reilly only
I recommend that you get a neti pot. I haven't had a serious sinus or throat problem since I starting using one at the first sign of badness. I bought mine from healthandyoga.com and it's been great.
Post a Comment