ACHOO!

Wow, it's been a while. Well, I'm going to school and working two jobs, blah blah blah. Enough of that. On to what brought me here today. Sneezing.

Yes, that's right, sneezing. I've been doing quite a lot of it lately. I had a cold. A little rhinitis with accompanying nasal and pulmonary congestion, rhinorrhea and arthralgias. I did a lot of sleeping (thanks, NyQuil); and as is the usual course, felt much better after three days.

But the sneezing persisted.

Sternutation, n. A sneeze. It's lifted directly from Latin. The root bears a resemblance to the Latin word sternere (to cast down), and to sternum, which still refers to the central chest bone.

Now it's been over a week and the sternutation continues. Can anyone actually DIE from sneezing? While there are no documented cases where the cause of death was sternutation, there have been deaths where the sneeze was a factor. Research has revealed many automobile accidents where the reported cause was a sneeze or two. Unfortunately, many of these have resulted in a fatality; athough, very often the fatality did not involve the sneezer.

Maybe sneezing is fatal to those around the sneezer, rather than the sneezer. Interesting. Speaking of interesting, I have found some other interesting things while doing research for this blog:

The Study of Sneezing

Everybody sneezes.

I'll end with this limerick:

There was a young man from Belize
Who tried hard to hold in a sneeze.
But it came out at last
As a powerful blast
That knocked down a number of trees.

Gesundheit!

chat soon.

xoxo