Hearin' Hoofbeats...

Personal confession time: I'm a hypochondriac. (The folks out there reading this who know me are probably choking back large, horse-like snorts of laughter right now...)

I guess it comes from my mom, who has hypochondriac tendencies, but not in the same league as mine. Every sniffle, every cut, every fever is the black plague, blood poisoning, influenza. I don't look for zebras, I look for unicorns...

Some of it may come from my childhood - when I was 6 I stepped on a galvanized nail and got blood poisoning, resulting in an extended hospital stay. I don't remember all that much from it, other than being scared out of my mind because I was the only kid in the pediatric ward staying overnight. To a six year old, an empty hospital ward at 2AM is pretty much indistinguishable from Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. No offense to any mad scientists, of course.

And I've managed to rack up a fair amount of oddball injuries - when I was a college student painting houses, I managed to get bitten by what I think was a brown recluse spider and had my left arm get all infected. When I was in my late 20s I developed gout (normally strikes men in their 50s and 60s). So there's juuuust enough reason fact behind my feverish imagination.

(Side note: This, as you can imagine, wreaked havoc on me as a first-time dad. The first time I saw my son spiking a temperature of 105ºF I was ready to drive him to Children's Hospital. My kid only had to throw up once and I was getting the Pedialyte ready. It's gotten a lot better now, as kids are a LOT tougher than we give them credit for.)

All this to chuckle about my neck... This past weekend we had an outdoor birthday party for my daughter (the evil genius). We invited her entire pre-school class, plus both families, and an assortment of extended family/friends etc. It's basically a start-to-summer kickoff barbeque.

While cooking up the third batch of hamburgers, I made a rookie mistake: I was separating two frozen patties with the spatula, and slipped and cut two fingers on my left hand. It was a very shallow cut, only slightly deeper than a standard paper cut, but it happened with a meat-covered spatula. This, as you can imagine, spurred my already fertile imagination with the most horrible of possibilities: Mad cow disease, tetanus, e-coli, etc.

Well, to make matters even more interesting, that night I was tossing and turning and managed to sleep wrong (can you see where this is going?) Woke up Sunday morning and my neck is sore. Yup. I am now firmly convinced that I have tetanus... Spent a good chunk of yesterday researching tetanus, etc. Common sense, as it usually does, prevailed - the likelihood of a shallow cut turning into tetanus in less than 48 hours is rather remote.

So I grabbed the Ben-Gay, applied liberally (about the only time you'll see me do anything liberally, har-dee-har-har), and woke up this morning feeling 99% back to normal. Yeah, I pinched a muscle. Not developing lockjaw...

So, there's your way-too-much-information-about-Jay post for the day.

That is all.