WARNING
By N. Mark Castro
(This classic Mark Castro article was first published in October 26, 2004. Will be printing more of Marky's articles that he simply refused to keep copies. - Mandi from Ambir's collections.)
It's
time for Alarming Medical News Items, the popular feature that can strike at
any time without warning symptoms. For your protection, this column undergoes a
rigorous fact-checking procedure under which, before we will print an item, it
must first be delivered to us by the Indonesian Postal Service. Don't bother to
thank us: I am not listening.
Speaking
of which, our first alarming item concerns the recently discovered:
Ear Problem From Hell
As previously mentioned,
working, or at least pretending to, work
as an expat has many benefits. For instance, you get to read so many useless
information that adds up to your useless conversational skills. I learned from
an American Medical Association newsletter containing an article about a North
Carolina man who went to his doctor complaining of a "full sensation"
in one ear, accompanied by a hearing loss. The doctor checked it out, and found
that the man's ear canal was blocked by -- I wish I was making this up -- a
plug of hardened "Super Glue."
Now, some of you are wondering, ''How does a person with an IQ higher than
pastry get Super Glue in his EAR and not know it?'' But you parents are no
doubt nodding and saying: “It would not surprise me to learn that this man has
a 3-year-old son.”
And, of course, you're right. According to the AMA newsletter, the son
“squirted the glue into his father's left ear while the man was sleeping.''
Surgeons unclogged his ear, but as medical consumers we can prevent this kind
of near-tragedy by remembering to:
1. Never keep 3-year-olds around the house.
2.
If you do, never sleep.
Also: You older children should remember that Super Glue is a serious household
repair substance and NOT a toy to be used in such pranks as applying it to the
toilet seats in the Faculty Men's Room, taking care to first prepare the
surface by wiping it clean of oil and dirt.
Our next item came from an article in the British medical journal The Lancet
with the following title: Exploding
Head Syndrome.
Quite frankly, I was disappointed by this syndrome. I naturally assumed, from
the title, that it would involve the actual explosion of a person's head,
ideally Kris Aquino during Game Ka Na Ba.
But it turns out to be just this weenie syndrome where you wake up in the
middle of the night having ''a violent sensation of explosion in the head.''
Big deal.
I get that all the time, but you don't see me whining to The Lancet. You see me
making a mental note to drink bourbon from smaller containers.
But not right now. Right now I want to tell you about the exciting news:
Advances in B.O. Measurement
An article from the Journal of the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration
and Air-conditioning Engineers written by a man named -- I still wish I am
making this up -- ''P. Ole Fanger.'' Mr. Fanger, from Denmark, has done a LOT
of research in the field of measuring exactly how much a given human tends to
stink up a given room, and he has come up with a unit of air pollution called
the ''olf'' (''from the Latin olfactus, or olfactory sense''). To quote the
article: “One olf is the emission rate of air pollutants (bioeffluents) from a
standard person (Figure 1).''
I sincerely wish that I could show you Figure 1, which is a truly wonderful
drawing of a standard person with dozens of little Smell Arrows shooting out of
his body. Looking at this drawing reminded me of one of the highlights of my
high school life, which is the time that I was with two friends, Moron 1 and
Moron 2, in a bar that was empty except for two women at the far end, and Moron
3, after maybe 17 San Miguel bottles, decided to Make a Move, which was pretty
funny because Moron 3, even on those occasions when he has total control over
his dentures, is not exactly Aga Muhlach, or even Richard Gomez.
But he went lunging over there, and, with all the subtlety of Hurricane
Katrina, attempted to strike up a conversation, which the two women were
clearly not interested in. So they were quiet, and after a while Moron 3 got quiet, and we were listening quietly, so the
whole bar was very quiet when Moron
3 had an unfortunate bodily event. It's the kind of event that can happen to
anybody, but it rarely happens with the magnitude that it happened to Moron 3. You talk about Hurrican Katrina. Of course, in those days we did not have modern measurement techniques, but we're sure that this event was completely off the scale on the Olf Meter. We're only sorry that we didn't get to see the two women sprint from the bar, because we were flat on the floor laughing so hard that we thought we were going to suffer a heart attack.
Anyway,
today's medical tip: Never undergo any kind of major surgery without first
making an appointment.
But
that's another story.
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